Music in Germany since 1968 9780521877596

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 9
Illustrations......Page 10
Music examples......Page 11
Acknowledgements......Page 13
Introduction......Page 15
Politics and ideas......Page 18
Darmstadt......Page 22
Documentation......Page 29
Dissemination and centres......Page 31
Ensembles......Page 37
Ligeti and Nono......Page 39
Kagel and Schnebel......Page 50
Zimmermann, Killmayer and Bredemeyer......Page 63
Henze......Page 71
Stockhausen......Page 79
‘Klangtypen’ and ‘musique concrète instrumentale’......Page 89
Notturno, temA and Pression......Page 91
Air and Kontrakadenz......Page 94
Engaging tradition......Page 100
Accanto and Salut für Caudwell......Page 102
Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied and Ein Kinderspiel......Page 110
Mouvement, Ausklang, Staub and Second Quartet......Page 117
Music with images......Page 121
Perspectives......Page 131
Tradition and inclusivity......Page 139
Orchestral music......Page 140
String chamber music......Page 143
Piano music......Page 149
Lieder......Page 153
Fremde Szenen......Page 157
The Chiffre cycle and Klangbeschreibung......Page 163
Frau/Stimme, Gesungene Zeit and Eine Stimme 1–3......Page 167
Fleuve......Page 169
Forms......Page 174
Jakob Lenz......Page 178
Tutuguri......Page 182
Die Hamletmaschine......Page 183
Die Eroberung von Mexico......Page 187
Séraphin......Page 193
Discourses......Page 196
Huber......Page 203
Spahlinger......Page 209
Ferneyhough......Page 212
Neo-Romanticism......Page 219
Zimmermann......Page 228
Goldmann......Page 230
Mahnkopf......Page 233
Mundry......Page 236
Saunders......Page 237
Pintscher......Page 239
Epilogue......Page 242
1 Contexts and institutions......Page 251
2 Expanded horizons: established composers after 1968......Page 254
3 The refusal of habit: Helmut Lachenmann......Page 260
4 Music and signs: Wolfgang Rihm......Page 265
5 Contemporaries of Lachenmann and Rihm: the younger generation......Page 272
Epilogue......Page 277
Bibliography......Page 278
Index......Page 291

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Music in Germany since 1968

Music in Germany since 1968 modifies the dominant historiography of music in post-war Germany by shifting its axis from the years of reconstruction after 1945 to the era following the events of 1968. Arguing that the social transformations of 1968 led to a new phase of music in Germany, Alastair Williams examines the key topics, including responses to serialism, music and politics, and the re-evaluation of tradition. The book devotes central chapters to Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm, as focal points for areas such as postmodernism, musical semiotics and action-based gestures. Further chapters widen the scope by considering the precursors and contemporaries of Rihm and Lachenmann, especially in relation to the idea of historical inclusion. Williams’s study also assesses the development of the Darmstadt summer courses, addresses the significance of German reunification, and considers the role of Germany in a new stage of musical modernism. is Reader in Music at Keele University. He is the author of New Music and the Claims of Modernity (1997) and Constructing Musicology (2001), and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (2002) and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004). He has also published articles in a wide range of music journals, including Music and Letters, Music Analysis and twentieth-century music. ALASTAIR WILLIAMS

Music Since 1900

general ed itor Arnold Whittall This series – formerly Music in the Twentieth Century – offers a wide perspective on music and musical life since the end of the nineteenth century. Books included range from historical and biographical studies concentrating particularly on the context and circumstances in which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to context will also be reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing, and promotion of new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries. Titles in the series Jonathan Cross The Stravinsky Legacy Michael Nyman Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond Jennifer Doctor The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–1936 Robert Adlington The Music of Harrison Birtwistle Keith Potter Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass Carlo Caballero Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics Peter Burt The Music of Toru Takemitsu David Clarke The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics M. J. Grant Serial Music, Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe Philip Rupprecht Britten’s Musical Language Mark Carroll Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe Adrian Thomas Polish Music since Szymanowski J. P. E. Harper-Scott Edward Elgar, Modernist

Yayoi Uno Everett The Music of Louis Andriessen Ethan Haimo Schoenberg’s Transformation of Musical Language Rachel Beckles Willson Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War Michael Cherlin Schoenberg’s Musical Imagination Joseph N. Straus Twelve-Tone Music in America David Metzer Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century Edward Campbell Boulez, Music and Philosophy Jonathan Goldman The Musical Language of Pierre Boulez: Writings and Compositions Pieter C. van den Toorn and John McGinness Stravinsky and the Russian Period: Sound and Legacy of a Musical Idiom David Beard Harrison Birtwistle’s Operas and Music Theatre Heather Wiebe Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton Music and Protest in 1968 Graham Griffiths Stravinsky’s Piano: Genesis of a Musical Language Martin Iddon John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance Martin Iddon New Music at Darmstadt: Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez Alastair Williams Music in Germany since 1968

Music in Germany since 1968 Alastair Williams

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521877596 © Alastair Williams 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Williams, Alastair. Music in Germany since 1968 / Alastair Williams. pages cm. – (Music since 1900) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-87759-6 1. Music – Germany – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. ML275.5.W55 2013 2012040704 780.9430 09045–dc23 ISBN 978-0-521-87759-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of illustrations page viii List of music examples ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1

1

Contexts and institutions Politics and ideas Darmstadt 8 Institutions 15

2

4

4

Expanded horizons: established composers after 1968 Ligeti and Nono 25 Kagel and Schnebel 36 Zimmermann, Killmayer and Bredemeyer Henze 57 Stockhausen 65

3

49

The refusal of habit: Helmut Lachenmann

75

‘Klangtypen’ and ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ Engaging tradition 86 Music with images 107 Perspectives 117

4

Music and signs: Wolfgang Rihm

164

Contemporaries of Lachenmann and Rihm: the younger generation 189 Refusal of habit 189 Historical reflection 205 Heightened perception: the younger generation

Epilogue

228

Notes 237 Bibliography Index 277 [vii]

75

125

Tradition and inclusivity 125 Events, voices and layers 149 Stage works – and instrumental theatre Discourses 182

5

25

264

219

Illustrations

1 2 3 4

[viii]

Dieter Schnebel at the 32nd Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1984. © Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt page 48 Helmut Lachenmann at the 29th Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1978. © Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt 87 Wolfgang Rihm at the 30th Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1980. © Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt 148 Photograph of Nicolaus A. Huber. © 2004 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 195

Music examples

2.1

Mauricio Kagel, Passé composé © Copyright by Henry Litolff’s Verlag, C. F. Peters Musikverlag, Frankfurt. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Limited, London. page 43 2.2 Dieter Schnebel, Schubert-Phantasie © by permission of SCHOTT Music, Mainz – Germany. 47 2.3 Wilhelm Killmayer, Schumann in Endenich: © by permission of SCHOTT Music, Mainz – Germany. 54 2.4 Hans Werner Henze, Tristan © 1975 SCHOTT Music, Mainz – Germany. 62 2.5 Stockhausen, ‘Michaels-Gruss’ from Donnerstag aus Licht © Stockhausen Foundation for Music, Kürten, Germany (www.stockhausen.org). 71 3.1 Helmut Lachenmann, Air, as depicted in Lachenmann’s structural diagram from Musik als existentielle Erfahrung © 1994 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (Air); © 1996 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (Musik als existentielle Erfahrung). 82 3.2 Lachenmann, Kontrakadenz © 1982 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 84 3.3 Lachenmann, Accanto © 1984 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 90 3.4 Lachenmann, Salut für Caudwell © 1985 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 95 3.5 Lachenmann, Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, as depicted in Lachenmann’s structural diagram from Musik als existentielle Erfahrung © 1980 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied); © 1996 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden (Musik als existentielle Erfahrung). 98 3.6 Lachenmann, Ein Kinderspiel © 1982 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 102 3.7 Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern © 1997 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 112 4.1 Wolfgang Rihm, Sub-Kontur © 1976 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/ UE32919. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 127 4.2a Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 130. 132 4.2b Rihm, Musik für drei Streicher © 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/ UE16764. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 133 4.3 Rihm, Klavierstück Nr. 7 © 1980 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE7216. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 138 4.4 Rihm, Neue Alexanderlieder: 5 Gedichte von Ernst Herbeck für Bariton und Klavier © 1979 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 32369. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 141 [ix]

x

List of music examples

4.5

Rihm, Fremde Szenex II © 1983 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 18108. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 146 4.6 Rihm, Chiffre I © 1983 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE34546. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 151 4.7 Rihm, Vers une symphonie fleuve I © 1995 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/ UE31448. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 157 4.8 Rihm, Jakob Lenz © 1978 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien. Libretto by Michael Fröhling Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 167 4.9 Rihm, Die Hamletmaschine © 1985 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 18660. Text von KA © 1978 by Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt/Main, representing Henschel Verlag, Berlin. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 172 4.10 Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico © 1991 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/ UE 19885. Originaltexte von Antonin Artaud © Editions Gallimard, Paris, Deutsche Übersetzung © Matthes & Seitz, München. Octavio Paz ‘Untergrund des Menschen’ © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt/Main Deutsche Übersetzung © Vervuert Verlagsgesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main. ‘Cantares Mexicanos’ Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved. 176 5.1a Schumann, Liederkreis Op. 39, ‘Zwielicht’. 193 5.1b Nicolaus A. Huber, Demijour © 1988 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 193 5.2 Mathias Spahlinger, 128 erfüllte augenblicke © 1989 by Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden. 196 5.3 Brian Ferneyhough, Carceri d’invenzione III © Copyright by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Limited, London. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Limited, London. 202 5.4 Hans-Jürgen von Bose, String Trio © by permission of Ars Viva Verlag, Mainz – Germany. 207 5.5 Friedrich Goldmann, Ensemblekonzert 2 © Copyright by Henry Litolff’s Verlag, C. F. Peters Musikverlag, Frankfurt. Reproduced by kind permission of Peters Edition Limited, London. 218 5.6 Matthias Pintscher, Janusgesicht for viola and violoncello 2001, BA 8271 © Bärenreiter-Verlag Karl Vötterle GmbH & Co. KG, Kassel. 226

Acknowledgements

Some of the research in this volume dates back to 2002 when I was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin, and I am grateful to Hermann Danuser for hosting my fellowship, both in Berlin and at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, where I also received generous advice from Ulrich Mosch. A Small Research Grant from the British Academy enabled a subsequent visit to the Paul Sacher Foundation, as well as a period at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, where I benefited from the help and support of Claudia Mayer; it also financed copyright permissions for the chapters on Lachenmann and Rihm. A Research Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council provided the time to complete the manuscript. In addition, an award from the Music Analysis Development Fund contributed to the costs for typesetting music examples, while the Keele University Research Institute for Humanities helped with the remaining costs for engraving music examples and with those for additional copyright permissions. Thanks are due to Victoria Cooper from Cambridge University Press for suggesting this project in the first place, and to her colleague Fleur Jones for advising on production issues. The outline of the book fell into place quickly after discussion with Arnold Whittall, who also provided incisive comments on the manuscript. Nina Whiteman typeset the music examples skilfully, and her approach as a composer to practical matters proved most beneficial. For events relating to Rihm, I would like to acknowledge not only the composer himself but also Amanda Glauert and Norbert Meyn from the Royal College of Music, Maja Graf from the Goethe-Institut, London, Paul Archbold from the Insitute for Musical Research, London, and Lucas Fels from the Arditti Quartet. Furthermore, interactions with Jonathan Cross, Berthold Hoeckner, Björn Heile, Max Paddison and Charles Wilson all had positive influences on the monograph. Finally, I would like to thank my family for living with and supporting this book. No existing writings by the author have been reproduced in unaltered form, but the text draws on articles from the following journals: Music Analysis, twentieth-century music, Music & Letters and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Full details of these publications are provided in the notes and bibliography. [xi]

Introduction

[1]

The widespread political unrest of 1968 challenged the model of prosperity that had prevailed in West Germany since the reconstruction after 1945. In the field of new music the social upheaval of this time helped to bring about a move away from the aesthetic values of serialism that had dominated in the post-war years. The immediate response to the events of 1968 was music with a stronger political dimension; the less immediate one was music that was more inclusive and more historically reflective. The social transformations of 1968 led to a new phase of music in Germany, and one that affected composers such as György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who had established reputations in the post-war years. Many of these altered attitudes were driven by Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm, who emerged as increasingly prominent figures in German art music at the end of the twentieth century, despite aesthetic differences and an age gap of seventeen years. In recognition of this changed environment, the present account modifies the dominant historiography of music in post-war Germany by shifting its axis from the twenty years of reconstruction after 1945 to the era from 1968 to 2000. Hence the time frame includes the end of the Cold War and extends into the years following German reunification in 1989. No attempt has been made to exclude music composed since 2000, although coverage is more selective after this date. The book devotes central chapters (3 and 4) to Lachenmann and Rihm, as focal points for topics – such as postmodernism, musical semiotics and action-based gestures – that affected a range of composers from older and younger generations. The chapters surrounding this core expand its context by considering the precursors (2) and contemporaries (5) of Rihm and Lachenmann, especially in the context of extended techniques and inclusive methods of composition. In sequence, Chapter 1 focuses on which institutions and which funding channels supported art music in Germany after 1968, and also considers how the patterns and prospects for funding changed after German reunification. Chapter 2 investigates how composers who established reputations in the early post-war years responded to the changed environment after 1968. Chapter 3 moves on to Lachenmann, scrutinizing how he endeavours to refuse the conventions of the bourgeois tradition, even when drawing on music from this repertoire. Chapter 4 runs in parallel to Chapter 3, enquiring how Rihm is able to

2

Music in Germany since 1968

engage, semiotically, with the genres of bourgeois music. Chapter 5 turns its attention to how the contemporaries of Lachenmann and Rihm, and younger figures, respond to the issues embodied in music since 1968. Finally, the Epilogue appraises the book’s main themes, with a particular focus on the renewed momentum modernism gained in the 1980s. The title Music in Germany is not intended to suggest that the book covers the full range of art, popular and traditional musics that existed in Germany at the end of the twentieth century. It refers more narrowly to the category of ‘new music’, although that term has not been used in the title because of its contested status. The stark statement made by Nicolaus A. Huber that ‘new music says something about music’ is one that could be applied to the majority of composers covered in this volume;1 but it is not a premiss that could be used easily in connection with discussion of Hans Werner Henze or Matthias Pintscher, even though the music of both composers is partly defined in relation to it. Since the aim of the book is not to impose a label on all the repertoire studied, the term ‘new music’ does not appear in the title. In his introduction to the Deutscher Musikrat’s vinyl LP series Zeitgenössische Musik in der Bundesrebublik Deutschland, Carl Dahlhaus specified that the collection was concerned with new music and stated that it ‘must be new in a qualitative, and not just in a chronological sense in order to be aesthetically and historically authentic’. This criterion is more in keeping with the concept of musical material associated with serialism than with the historically reflective turn of the 1970s, even though the series extends to 1980. However, Dahlhaus then listed three further categories for inclusion: works that have established themselves in the repertoire, those which illuminate stylistic tendencies with particular clarity, and those which add to musical resources, and stimulate the development of methods of composition and aesthetic thought.2 These conditions articulate a process of canon formation as well. All the same, it is noticeable that they are somewhat softer and less exclusive than Dahlhaus’s more austere concept of historically authentic new music. Certainly, Dahlhaus’s criteria are closer to the approach of this book in their more malleable form. The position of Lachenmann and Rihm as central figures in this volume inevitably influenced the selection of music and composers considered. Lachenmann functions as a focus for the idea of music as critical thought; Rihm’s presence is a shaping force in the choice of composers and scores in which the idea of historical reflection is important. Dahlhaus’s other criterion for inclusion in his record series was citizenship of the Federal Republic of Germany. This rule had the effect of including Kagel and Henze (who was resident in Italy) but of excluding

Introduction

3

Ligeti (who took Austrian citizenship) as well as Brian Ferneyhough and Luigi Nono. The remit is wider in this volume, extending to non-German composers who were resident in Germany (such as Ligeti, Ferneyhough and Rebecca Saunders), non-German composers who were a major presence in German music (such as Nono) and German composers who were not resident in Germany (such as Henze). Accordingly, the book is entitled Music in Germany rather than German Music, an approach that enables a focus on Germany not just as a nation, but also as a cultural centre. This stance has some affinity with the one adopted in the Deutscher Musikrat’s more recent CD series, covering 1950–2000, which includes music that was either conceived in Germany or was significant for music in Germany. The idea of music in Germany also allows a distinction to be drawn between composers such as Rihm and Lachenmann, who are very much part of the German tradition, and those such as Ligeti, who engaged with it more obliquely. Although the range of this volume is wider than Dahlhaus’s model envisaged, selectivity remains inevitable. Perhaps the most prominent omission from this account is Heiner Goebbels, on the grounds that he is as much a dramatist as a musician. The emphasis of this book is mainly, but not exclusively, on music in West Germany and in the subsequently reunified Germany. The idea of new music is not one that flourished in East Germany, because during the Cold War new music was promoted as a progressive category in the West, partly in order to distinguish it from the ‘other’ Germany. Despite different institutional approaches to contemporary music in the two Germanies, musical communication did nonetheless take place across the border. The sections on Reiner Bredemeyer and Friedrich Goldmann in this study indicate that interest in historical reflection and postmodernism extended to both sides of the Berlin Wall. The study adopts a number of approaches, including explanation of scores and aesthetic suppositions, scrutiny of historiographical dynamics and examination of institutional support. It places more emphasis on casestudies than on repertoire survey, and its focus is more hermeneutic than analytical. This blend of perspectives is in keeping with a central theme in the study: to understand how composers since 1968 have contributed to the larger cultural project of bringing the more abstract procedures of modernity into contact with heightened, self-reflexive modes of perception.

1 Contexts and institutions

Politics and ideas

[4]

Throughout the Cold War, Germany existed as two nations, albeit with shared pasts and with continuing shared interests.1 The success of the postwar avant-garde coincided by and large with what became known as the ‘economic miracle’ in West Germany, which began in the late 1940s and extended through the 1950s boosted by the American-funded Marshall Plan. So the era of high modernism was one that benefited from an economic recovery that was keen, in a Cold-War environment, to promote culture as a marker of artistic freedom in a way that could be readily distinguished from a doctrine of socialist realism. Furthermore, a climate of dynamic reconstruction supported the way that the aesthetic innovations of the 1950s moved decisively away from the musical traditions that had been favoured by the National Socialists. West Germany experienced a small recession in 1966–7, a moment which roughly coincided with the end of the first phase of post-war modernism. Moreover, it was at this time that student protest movements started to challenge the prevailing values that had accompanied the post-war economic boom, leading to the unrest of 1968. In addition, the Soviet suppression of what became known as the Prague Spring ensured that 1968 was a significant year for East Germany as well. During the 1970s and 1980s, the West German economy fell more in line with the other economies of western Europe, experiencing the oil crises of the 1970s, until it faced an economic challenge of a different sort in 1989. When it became evident late in this year that the Berlin Wall no longer fulfilled a purpose, with border crossings opening elsewhere in eastern Europe, the two Germanies quickly embarked upon a process of reunification. Power moved away from Bonn, which had been the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, to Berlin, which itself underwent extensive renovation, not least so that the one-time centre of the city (which had been in the German Democratic Republic) could resume its previous function. Even though upgrading infrastructure in the former East Germany proved to be an expensive process, this cost did not prevent a unified Germany from retaining the position of the former Federal Republic as the most powerful economy in Europe at the turn of the millennium. Nevertheless, extensive reconstruction had the practical effect of sucking money away from the arts,

Contexts and institutions

5

as subsidy became less of a priority at a time when culture ceased to be an emblem of western freedom. In West Germany, as elsewhere in Europe and the USA, the protest movements of the 1960s conflated a number of issues: American military action in Vietnam, the emergence of a youth culture linked to rock music and associated with more permissive attitudes towards sexuality, frustration with discipline and authority, whether experienced in the work place or in the family, and dissatisfaction with the model of economic prosperity that had prevailed in the post-war years. What set apart the protests in West Germany from those in other places was the shadow of the National Socialist past and the presence of the other Germany. The upshot of the first of these circumstances was that a younger generation felt that its predecessors had failed to reflect sufficiently on the Nazi era amid the bustle of the post-war boom. The effect of the second was that left-wing activity was regarded with alarm in a country that was only separated from an actual communist model by the Berlin Wall. It is generally considered that the shooting of the student Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967 by a plain-clothes police officer (who was later acquitted) at a demonstration against the state visit of the Shah of Iran (in which it appears Ohnesorg was only indirectly involved) was a turning point in the student movement. As Nick Thomas observes: ‘Ohnesorg’s shooting by a plain-clothes police officer prompted tens of thousands of students to become politically active for the first time.’2 The second inflammatory act of violence took place in April 1968 against the charismatic student leader Rudi Dutschke, who was shot in the head outside the Berlin headquarters of the West German student protest movement (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund). He survived the actual incident (initially he recuperated in the Italian home of Hans Werner Henze) but eventually died in 1979, having never fully recovered. He was assaulted not by the state but by an individual who had been strongly influenced by the demonic characterization of Dutschke in the right-wing Bild-Zeitung that was part of the Axel Springer press empire.3 The attempted assassination led to widespread riots, with the offices of the Springer media a particular target, because it was felt that the right-wing press was culpable for the opinions espoused by Dutschke’s assailant. It was against this background of distrust between activists and authorities that the terrorist movements of the 1970s arose, notably the Red Army Faction, with its stated aim of bringing down the state by means of violence. The death of Ohnesorg had enabled those sympathetic to this aspiration to claim that ‘the state shot first’.4 ‘May 1968’ is the shorthand for the well-known events that took place in Paris at that time, where student demonstrations, with the support of

6

Music in Germany since 1968

workers, came close to toppling the government. Roughly speaking, that date also marked the end of an adherence to structuralism as a critical methodology in France and it triggered the subsequent turn to poststructuralism. Jacques Derrida’s Writing and Difference appeared in 1967 and Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition was published in 1968. The radical journal Tel Quel offered a forum for emerging post-structuralists and associated itself directly with the social unrest of the late 1960s. However, though post-structuralists identified with the energy and the anti-authoritarian stance of the protest movements, they mistrusted the Marxist leanings of these groups, because they regarded such sympathies as emblematic of dubious power structures. The age of structuralism and the era of post-war serialism, sometimes known as ‘structuralism’ in Germany, more or less coincided historically and shared comparable principles to the extent that both valued structure more highly than expressive subjectivity.5 Serial composers placed great store on explaining how their techniques worked and overestimated the capacity of their systems to control detail, especially from a perceptual perspective. Equally, structuralist readings tended to stop at the point where the underlying structure had been revealed and thereby underestimated the potential for individual elements to unravel or obscure the controlling codes. That post-structuralism, which turned its attention to the information suppressed by structuralism, exerted only an indirect influence on German composers is in part explained by the fact that it did not receive a warm welcome in Germany from the broader field of humanities and social sciences. The presence of post-structuralism was, however, at least acknowledged by the leading social theorist Jürgen Habermas in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (published in 1985), which attempts to reveal the neo-conservative underpinnings of various post-structuralist theories, as part of his more general critique of postmodernism.6 Despite underestimating the creative dynamics of post-structuralism, this book makes the valuable point that it is possible to conceive of rationality without recourse to the metaphysical systems that are attacked by poststructuralism. A few of the composers discussed in the present study explicitly acknowledge post-structuralism: Wolfgang Rihm refers to Roland Barthes, Brian Ferneyhough refers to Gilles Deleuze, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and Rebecca Saunders refer to Jacques Derrida, and Nicolaus A. Huber refers to Jean Baudrillard. Beyond these cases, though, the parallels between poststructuralism and music in Germany at the time need to be teased out. One shared tendency is a concern with unpicking the conventions that sustain integrated value systems; and this quality was especially

Contexts and institutions

7

characteristic of Mauricio Kagel, for whom the passively accepted customs of the bourgeois repertoire were of paramount interest. Dismantling bourgeois practices is also important to Helmut Lachenmann, who additionally demonstrates an interest in the sort of suppressed detail that is valued by post-structuralism, by drawing into the musical fabric the mechanisms of instrumental sound production that are marginalized by standard notions of beauty. Furthermore, Nicolaus A. Huber has consistently exposed the devices of musical expression to a comparable level of scrutiny. In addition to unravelling accepted practices, post-structuralism also showed an interest in older manifestations of schizophrenia as a way of subverting the symbolic order, with the work of surrealist author and actor Antonin Artaud receiving much attention. Derrida’s Writing and Difference devotes two essays to him, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) features him prominently as a force that cannot be pinned down by a signifying regime, as does the sequel volume A Thousand Plateaus (1980).7 This sense of the pre-symbolic is also central to Rihm’s numerous engagements with Artaud. Beyond Artaud, though, it is Rihm’s capacity to convey music as a sign system, and then to detach meanings and affects from established mechanisms, that reveals a thoroughly post-structuralist awareness of the mobility of signification. The social transition of 1968 marked the start of a cultural shift that led to music in Germany becoming more historically reflective in the mid 1970s, as composers sought to reconnect with the past.8 This transformation, which affected many already established composers, stemmed not only from a renewed interest in tradition, but also from a wider frustration with a blinkered belief in the progress of technology and knowledge. Kagel’s film Ludwig van (1970) stands as an early example of this re-evaluation of the past, because although it is not especially sympathetic to cherished values, it does indicate that the institutionalization of Beethoven is a topic that can be encountered creatively. The turning point of 1968 was productive not just for music, but for other arts too in investigating the Romantic legacy that the National Socialist era had made so problematic. The film-maker Werner Herzog (b. 1942), the artist Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) and the artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) all explored images in the 1970s that could be related to the Romantic natural environment conveyed in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Writing of West German culture in the 1970s, Andreas Huyssen comments: ‘This search for history is of course also a search for cultural identities today, and as such it clearly points to the exhaustion of the tradition of the avant-garde, including postmodernism.’9 Latter in the same article he qualifies the remark: ‘At the same time, the tradition of avant-gardism, if stripped of

8

Music in Germany since 1968

its universalizing and normative claims, leaves us with a precious heritage of artistic and literary materials, practices, and strategies which still inform many of today’s most interesting writers and artists.’10 This view is of relevance to the musical situation, for it embraces the turn to historical reflection and encourages the idea that the resurgence of modernism in the 1980s may well also be a form of rumination on the avant-garde as itself a tradition.

Darmstadt The Darmstadt summer courses represented a microcosm of the events covered in this book – one that sometimes influenced what happened elsewhere, especially the international dimension of music in Germany, and one that sometimes reflected it. Since Darmstadt was situated in what became the American zone, the town authorities were able to obtain funding for music courses because the occupying power saw cultural regeneration as an important means of stabilizing Germany after the war. More specifically, Everett Helm, an officer of the Theatre and Music Branch of the American military, was instrumental in supporting the summer courses from his base in Wiesbaden.11 From 1946 to 1948, the courses were held not in Darmstadt, but in a hunting lodge in nearby Kranichstein. They were directed by Wolfgang Steinecke, a cultural adviser to the city of Darmstadt, until his death in 1961 as a result of being hit by a vehicle in the street. Steinecke’s successor in 1963 was Ernst Thomas, a music journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who was chosen by the town authorities and who ran the courses along the same lines as his predecessor until the crisis at the end of the 1960s forced him to reconsider tried and tested practices. In their early years, the courses did not endeavour to promote serial technique, although Steinecke aimed to support the music of Schoenberg, which had been banned by the Nazis. It was not until the 1950s that composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna attempted to build on the serial legacy of Webern, with the support of Steinecke, as reflected in a symposium held during the 1953 course.12 Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser’s large-scale study of the first phase of the Darmstadt courses places the end of this stage in 1966,13 a date that coincides with Jürgen Habermas’s argument (using Adorno’s term) that it was in the mid 1960s that the spirit of aesthetic modernity began to age.14 In the previous year, a symposium was held on form in the new music, a choice of topic which indicated that change was afoot because it implied some sort of rapprochement with the past. The symposium included lectures by

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Theodor W. Adorno, Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Carl Dahlhaus, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and Rudolf Stephan. Except for the talks given by Boulez and Stephan, these contributions constituted the whole issue of Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1966).15 ‘Form in the New Music’ was one of a number of lectures and presentations Adorno gave at the Darmstadt summer courses during his eight visits between 1950 and 1966.16 The recently established summer courses had given him a chance to engage with new developments in post-war music on his return from the USA to Germany in 1949 (the year in which Philosophy of New Music appeared).17 As a result, Adorno was able to exert some influence on current approaches to composition, and was also positioned to reconsider his aesthetic thinking in the light of recent developments in music. This two-way process is evident in ‘Form in the New Music’, which explores one of the main threads in Adorno’s writings on music: musical form as an embodiment, and potential reconfiguration, of social antagonisms. Adorno’s presence at Darmstadt was defined mainly by two essays. The first of these, ‘The Ageing of the New Music’ (1955), did not stem from a Darmstadt lecture, but was principally concerned with the figures associated with the summer courses; they found a spokesman in the person of the musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who responded to the accusation of ageing by drawing attention to the essay’s lack of specific examples and to its apparent lack of familiarity with recent developments.18 And yet, Adorno’s central claim proved to be rather tenacious: technical advances should derive from subjective need, as they did in the case of Schoenberg’s innovations, not from abstract planning. This central point is repeated in ‘Form in the New Music’, where Adorno comments that ‘the reduction of music to any supposedly bare material in fact stands in need of subjective legitimation’.19 The second of the essays that shaped Adorno’s presence at Darmstadt was his ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1961), which helped to repair some of the damage done to his standing in new music circles by ‘The Ageing’.20 So that compositional processes would avoid atrophied objectivity, ‘Vers une musique informelle’ famously envisages a practice in which form would arise, not from pre-established categories, but from the needs of the material. ‘Form in the New Music’ upholds this claim when it states: ‘Integral form would emerge from the specific tendencies of all musical materials. With the liquidation of musical types, integral form can arise henceforth only from bottom to top, not the other way round.’21 Hence music that generates form from the inner life of its material would avoid the restrictions not only of traditional schema, but also of rigid compositional systems.

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Brown, Ligeti, Dahlhaus and Kagel talked more extensively about open form than Adorno at the 1965 symposium, and they agreed on one thing, at least: however open the form may be on paper, it is closed in performance, because the listener only hears one version at a time. As well as giving a paper, Dahlhaus responded to the other presentations in a closing statement. To Brown’s suggestion that form can be created in performance, Dahlhaus offered the somewhat exasperated reply that the approach would erode the work-concept. He also resisted Kagel’s attempt to shift the emphasis away from composed form to articulation on the part of the listener, by arguing that large-scale form cannot be heard unless it is composed. Although Adorno’s notion of ‘musique informelle’ did not specifically envisage open form, Dahlhaus directed criticism at this idea too, on the basis that the approach overemphasized isolated details; a criticism which neglected to mention that Adorno envisaged small-scale events leading to larger forms.22 The symposium reflected back on the achievements and limitations of serialism; it engaged with what was then the contemporary preoccupation with open form; and it hinted at the future. Ligeti’s article referred to Adorno’s material theory of form, which argued that because formal processes such as ‘themes, bridge passages and development’ have qualities that are not entirely dependent on their position in the music, they can be used to signify traditional functions in unexpected contexts.23 Coming from Ligeti in 1965, this was not an abstract point, given his subsequent propensity for referring to established music by means of untraditional techniques. Arguably, though, the material theory of form was of even more significance to compositions from the 1970s by Wolfgang Rihm, which achieved a kind of ‘musique informelle’ by retaining the memory of traditional elements, while detaching them from their associated organizing syntax. By 1967, the open form idea discussed in the seminar of 1965 had reached new proportions with Stockhausen’s composition seminar devoted to the collective composition Ensemble, an idea that was continued in his classes of 1968 with Musik für ein Haus. In 1969 Stockhausen’s sessions were devoted to realizations of intuitive texts from his Aus den sieben Tagen, but this time they faced stiff competition because the same year also saw a performance of Lachenmann’s Air, in which the composer’s ideas about structure through timbre and instrumental energy were realized on an orchestral scale. The obvious polarization between the stances of the two composers no doubt aided the rise of Lachenmann at Darmstadt and increased a sense of frustration with the authority invested in Stockhausen at the institution, a sentiment which continued until he departed from the courses after making his contribution in 1974.

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In 1970 a number of strands contributed to a crisis: a loss of the momentum that had propelled the institution from 1946, a generational shift which manifested itself in concern over the continued prominence of Stockhausen, a desire to make the courses more participatory, frustration at the power held by Ernst Thomas, who was perceived as primarily an administrator, and the impact of the events of 1968 on thinking about music and politics.24 In order to represent these views, a so-called ‘Darmstadt Delegation’ was elected, comprising the composers Tim Souster and Nicolaus A. Huber, the artist Mary Bauermeister, the percussionist Christoph Caskel and the journalist Reinhard Oehlschlägel. Thomas replied publicly to this group’s criticisms by asserting that it was his responsibility to maintain the standards of the courses,25 although in practice he did indirectly incorporate some of their suggestions. Moreover, he established his own advisory panel comprising the pianist Aloys Kontarsky, the cellist Siegfried Palm and Christoph Caskel, who was a member of the alternative committee as well. He also set up the working studio with a view to enabling more participation from younger composers. Nevertheless, the most significant alteration to the courses came from the town authorities, who, for financial reasons, changed them from annual to biennial occasions. Further calls for change were made by Oehlschlägel in a pamphlet that was distributed at the 1972 course, despite him being banned from attendance. The feeling of dissatisfaction at the time is conveyed by Lachenmann’s portrait: ‘The great masters (Stockhausen, Ligeti, Kagel and Xenakis – the wonderful exception was Christian Wolff) propounded their distilled doctrines; or put more modestly, they presented their works, without communicating seriously with one another, or with the course participants.’ Lachenmann’s account then goes on to describe his own composition studio in equally unflattering terms, by suggesting that its participants were caricaturing existing innovations.26 This studio was the one Thomas had put in place, as a way of enabling more participation, and the fact that it was entrusted to Lachenmann indicated the director’s interest in working with him. Nevertheless, even this sensible development did not come about without problems. Lachenmann wrote to Thomas saying that he would only accept the invitation to run the studio on the condition that his appointment was also approved by the ‘committee’ co-responsible for the shape of the courses.27 Thomas replied politely but firmly that he was unable to accede to that condition for the legal reason that the city of Darmstadt had appointed an advisory panel which was the only body authorized to approve contributions to the courses, although he indicated that Christoph Caskel was a member of both

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committees.28 Despite his desire not to be caught between official and unofficial committees, Lachenmann took on the role. Ligeti gave a clear sense of what it was like to be on the receiving end of discontent in a statement at a seminar on the aesthetic and political criteria in compositional criticism that included papers by the musicologists Carl Dahlhaus and Reinhold Brinkmann. Clearly stung by those composers who accused the leading avant-garde figures of elitism, he took an orthodox modernist line whereby he challenged the younger generation to match the innovations of early scores by Boulez or Stockhausen. In doing so, he missed the significance of Lachenmann who was very much present that year; and he also failed to understand that the political approach was an attack on the ideology of innovation and progress. He concluded, in a comment that is likely to have been a retort to the performance that year of Nicolaus A. Huber’s Harakiri (discussed in Chapter 5), which challenges the expressive conventions of music: ‘don’t confuse musical structure with social and economic concerns which are on a different plane!’29 Even though this stance now looks unduly formalist, Ligeti was not the only one to express concerns at the extent of Huber’s ideology critique, and it is understandable that someone who had witnessed fascism and communism at first hand would wish to preserve some distance between music and politics. In their papers, Dahlhaus and Brinkmann argued more convincingly than Ligeti against the idea of the unmediated political reality of music, the former explicitly rejecting Nono’s thesis that his political music should be measured not in aesthetic, but in purely political terms.30 As he conveyed his general argument in a summary for the press, Dahlhaus maintained that music either becomes trivial for political effect or loses its political dimension by attending to the needs of musical integrity. However, he envisaged that a way out of this dilemma might be for a composer to interrupt a musical event in order to make the public aware that nothing escapes politics. This was an idea taken further by Brinkmann, who made an exception of Lachenmann as a politically engaged composer on the basis that he broke aesthetic taboos by questioning norms of musical thinking and hearing.31 What is more, Thomas adopted this line in his editorial, which was mainly about his restructuring of the courses, for the thirteenth issue of Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, in which the articles by Dahlhaus and Brinkmann also appeared. In his statement, Thomas quoted from a page-length essay Lachenmann wrote on the socio-critical function of music for the summer issue of the music magazine Melos in 1972: ‘To compose music to change society: that is an hypocrisy, or more sympathetically, a quixotic gesture.’ Furthermore, Thomas went on to quote

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Lachenmann, explaining, in an argument that was admittedly close to that of Dahlhaus, how only reactionary musical gestures could generate political action.32 Whatever Lachenmann had intended to achieve with his viewpoint, the performative effect of Thomas quoting it was to separate him from Nicolaus A. Huber, even though the two figures have subsequently been considered to be allies. With this endorsement from influential figures, Lachenmann came to be a key figure in navigating through the muddle of politically committed music towards the renewal of Darmstadt in the 1980s. Even though he was only seven years younger than Stockhausen, his emergence represented a generational shift too, because the latter had been prominent for over twenty years. If the first wave (in the 1970s) of the ageing-of-the-new was the music-aspolitics debate, then the second was the music-as-historical-reflection debate. Although the latter moved decisively away from political music and intuitive music, it retained aspects of both: from the former it acquired a preference for meaning over structure and learned to attack the ideology of technical advancement; and from the latter it took the idea of spontaneity. A youthful Rihm first visited Darmstadt in 1970, thereby being plunged straight into the crisis, and he continued to attend courses during the 1970s, as did other figures associated with the so-called ‘new-Romanticism’. The environment of the 1978 course was far removed from the political turmoil of six years earlier. The programme included new string trios by Hans-Jürgen von Bose, Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Rihm, all of which contained allusions to late Beethoven. Significantly, Rihm’s trio Musik für drei Streicher was awarded the Kranichstein Music Prize by a panel that included Ferneyhough and Lachenmann. The latter’s Pression for a cellist was heard that year too, as was his paper ‘Bedingungen des Materials’ (discussed in Chapter 3), in which Lachenmann expounds his own way of responding to the past. There was also a presentation, ‘Zur Entstehung des Klangs . . . ’ (‘On the Formation of Sound . . . ’), from the French spectralist composer Gérard Grisey. Spectralism is a compositional technique which uses analysis of the harmonic spectrum to build sonorities from overtones, with results that lie somewhere between harmony and timbre. Although significant beyond France, it did not exert much influence in Germany except, perhaps, on those late pieces by Ligeti which make extensive use of natural harmonics. Nevertheless, Grisey’s lecture was very much aimed at his Darmstadt audience for, as Eric Drott has observed, it not only served the constative purpose of describing the spectralist approach, it also achieved the performative effect of marking out a symbolic space. It did so by indicating that the individuality of sound enabled by spectralism was preferable to the

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alternatives represented, on the one hand, by the hierarchy of neo-tonality and, on the other, by the levelling of neo-serialism.33 Thus the lecture offered a way beyond what its author portrayed implicitly as the impasses associated, first, with the neo-Romantics Rihm and von Bose and, second, with the post-serialist Lachenmann. In 1981 Friedrich Hommel, who like his predecessor was a music journalist at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, became director of the courses and presided over what is widely regarded as a successful era that coincided with a revitalization of modernism. In doing so, he gained from the changes in structure and staffing put in place by the less popular Thomas, who was generally considered to be an instrument of the city authorities. By the 1980s, the composers who emerged in the 1950s had been replaced by Rihm (who taught for the first time in 1982), Lachenmann, Ferneyhough and Grisey. Nevertheless, these arrangements represented continuity as well as change, because Ferneyhough was open in his admiration for the achievements of the early 1950s, as was Lachenmann in a more qualified way. In addition to consolidating teaching staff, Hommel paid attention to figures who had either attended Darmstadt in the more distant past or had been previously neglected. Cage was in the first category: after the waves created by his symbolic visit of 1958, he had not been invited back by Thomas, and so it was left to Hommel to bring him to Darmstadt again in 1990, where he gave a lecture on mesostic techniques. Morton Feldman, another American experimentalist, occupied the second category, and was a well-received guest composer in 1984 and 1986. The music of Italian Giacinto Scelsi received special attention in 1986 as well, which was consistent with the broader discovery of it at this time. The 1980s also witnessed a revival of interest in Nono, particularly in relation to the stylistic change of his late style, and a memorial concert was held for him in 1990. Alongside such re-evaluations, the 1980s also saw heated debates about minimalism, which were very much influenced by the tensions of the postmodernism debate in Germany at this time. In 1986, factions emerged when the Kronos Quartet played American postmodernist repertoire and the Arditti Quartet performed modernist scores. As Christopher Fox points out, what was lost in this dispute was that neither of the ensembles was committed rigorously to enforcing this division in their programming.34 Equally significant was a symposium in 1994 devoted to the writings and music of Adorno, an event which demonstrated that modernism was becoming increasingly reflexive and more willing to examine the interests and functions served by its own discourses. The Beitrag for that year, edited by Gianmario Borio and Ulrich Mosch, was devoted to the topic of music and aesthetics; it contained Cage’s lecture on mesostics, Ferneyhough’s

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‘Parallel Universes’, Lachenmann’s ‘Dialectical Structuralism’ and an essay by Borio on the crisis of the (Adornian) category of material. Hommel’s directorship also encompassed the ending of the Cold War in 1989, which allowed him to facilitate much wider European participation, including full representation from East German composers. Solf Schaefer, who took over the courses from 1995, continued with this policy of broader involvement, and he maintained the process of reconciliation with the past by inviting Stockhausen back in 1996. Nonetheless, if the changed political situation offered new opportunities for international participation, it also presented difficulties: public spending in Germany became far less stable after 1989, partly due to the cost of reunifying Germany and partly because culture lost the prestige it had enjoyed during the Cold War. Accordingly, Thomas Schäfer, who became director in 2009, made funding arrangements in keeping with the post-Cold War situation. Instead of being supported entirely by the city of Darmstadt, the courses and the Darmstadt archive are now also financed by the Siemens Foundation and by the greater Frankfurt region, with the result that the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt is now extending its activities beyond the summer courses to concerts in the wider region, and is seeking to make its archive available in a digital format.35

Institutions Documentation The historical shift at Darmstadt during the 1970s was part of the means by which high modernism became sedimented into history. The need to document such processes was recognized by the opening in 1986 of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. Initially based on the collections of its wealthy patron, the Foundation acquired the estates of Stravinsky and Webern in the 1980s and now houses sketches and letters by many of the composers discussed in this book, including Brian Ferneyhough, Hans Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm amd Dieter Schnebel, as well as possessing an archive devoted to the Arditti Quartet. The practice at Darmstadt of composers giving lectures on their recent innovations encouraged them to use sketches as teaching materials and thus to value such materials as a resource. Hence the Sacher Foundation was able to build on an established way of working in making sketches available to scholars. The standard goal of sketch studies is to show how a particular result was achieved from underlying ideas, by demonstrating how weaker prospects

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were weeded out in the compositional process. In the case of a multimedia composer such as Kagel, however, whose sources extend to materials such as newspaper clippings and tourist brochures, this trajectory becomes less plausible. Such documents tend to suggest instead a more provisional approach to the creative process, which does not lead inevitably to one outcome. Indeed, this contingency is fully accepted by Ferneyhough, who uses his sketches for teaching in order to show that underlying processes can be taken in directions other than the one achieved in the published score.36 Nevertheless, from an analytical perspective, scholars tend to rely heavily on Ferneyhough’s sketches in order to trace the procedures by which the final results came about. Such a compositional trail has been harder to find since the 1990s, the point at which Ferneyhough started using a computer to work through compositional processes, and to typeset his scores.37 Lachenmann also sketches extensively, and although his workings are less multimedia than Kagel’s, they do not always lead seamlessly to the resulting scores because some of his decisions on timbral organization appear to be intuitive.38 Rihm, by contrast, does not offer much by way of sketches, understood in the established sense of pre-compositional operations (as one might expect from a composer who values spontaneity). That said, his tendency to place various pieces in dialogue with one another might be deemed to constitute a more public working method, as might his inclination to revisit material by writing a new score instead of by confining his thought processes to sketches. Another valuable resource that ran in tandem with musical initiatives in Germany was the Musik-Konzepte series, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, and published by edition text + kritik. Its status lies somewhere between that of a journal, since it appears four times per year, and an edited book. Although by no means restricted to new music and its composers, the publication certainly reflected the editors’ commitment to this area, and many of the composers covered in this book have been the subject of volumes. The special editions in this series included two devoted to Cage – the second of these reflecting the editors’ close acquaintance with his Europeras – and three allocated to Schumann, indicating the importance attached to him by those interested in new music. Early in the twenty-first century, the series was taken over by Ulrich Tadday, who has edited volumes on Rihm, Lachenmann and Wilhelm Killmayer amongst others. With the large amount of recordings made by radio stations, it was relatively easy for the Deutscher Musikrat to document musical activities in Germany. One of its major series covers music from 1950 to 2000 in 150 CDs. Unlike the vinyl recordings (directed by Dahlhaus) of contemporary music in West Germany, this CD series (edited by Hermann Danuser and

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Frank Schneider) is dedicated to music from the former East and West Germanies and (as mentioned in the Preface) also includes music that was either conceived in Germany or was significant for music in Germany. The categories covered are concert music (which receives the most attention), electronic music, music theatre, applied music (meaning music for media such as radio, film and stage), jazz and popular music. These groupings in their turn are broken down into various sub-classes. Substantial works are generally represented by excerpts: the meta-opera CD, for example, contains sections from Ligeti’s Aventures and Le Grand Macabre, from Kagel’s Aus Deutschland and from Cage’s Europeras 1 and 2. Another relevant series from Deutscher Musikrat, which is chaired by Rihm, provides portraits of younger composers.39

Dissemination and centres There was a familiar pattern of support for successful composers in West Germany during the Cold War, and to a lesser extent after it: employment at a music Hochschule, mainly confined to teaching composition students, was combined with commissions and performances that were enabled by the strong culture of music festivals and radio stations (and their associated orchestras). With a strong emphasis on commissions, this approach encouraged composers to establish strong identities so as to make them recognizable figures. This model is different to the one that was, and is, adopted in the UK and the USA, where many composers are less dependent on commissions because they are employed by universities. Dieter Schnebel provides a sense of how composers were sustained outside the academy when he aptly comments: As composers of new music, what would we be without the commissions that we get from the various radio stations, without the performances at the relevant music festivals, without the radio symphony orchestras and choirs that play our works, mostly with outstanding quality, and without the editor-producers [Redakteure], who stand up for us and knowledgeably comment on our music?’40

With the strong economic recovery in the 1950s and the associated firm financial commitment to culture, music festivals and concert series flourished, most of them either in co-operation with a radio station or under the control of one. The federal structure of Germany meant that individual regions had their own centres which could be identified with radio stations and their related musical institutions. Moreover, this level of public funding continued through the less economically favourable 1970s: indeed, Beal

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observes that ‘between 1979 and 1981 alone, the eleven West German radio stations produced more than two thousand live or studio recordings of new music’.41 The salaried orchestras that were attached to radio stations were major conduits for new music, though this function and the security it provided did not prevent orchestral musicians from making their feelings known about challenges to established practices, as mentioned in Chapter 4 in relation to the Frankfurt premiere of Lachenmann’s Air. From the 1950s until the mid 1980s, radio stations on the West German network were under instructions to perform an educational role (Bildungsauftrag), which meant that they were not only expected to provide access to new music but were also required to offer supporting information. The paradox of the Bildungsauftrag was that it represented a top-down model of cultural distribution, even though some of the music it promoted, most notably that by Kagel, was committed to revealing the artificial nature of the customs and practices of bourgeois music from which such an approach derived. Nonetheless, it was part of a system that facilitated unparalleled support for musical innovation, providing access to and information about contemporary music for those who were interested. It was not until 1984 that private radio stations emerged in Germany, and from this point the educational function became less of a priority at subsidized radio stations, as the balance between the (not unproblematic) categories of ‘entertainment music’ (‘Unterhaltungsmusik’) and ‘serious music’ (‘ernste Musik’) was increasingly driven by commercial needs. Furthermore, reunification brought with it increased private competition, as the established broadcasters faced smaller budgets.42 Apart from Darmstadt, the principal centre that tends to be mentioned in connection with the new music scene in Germany is Donaueschingen, the Black Forest spa town at the source of the river Danube. Founded in 1921, the Donaueschingen Festival was initially associated with Hindemith, who was a prominent figure at the time. The fortunes of the festival, which was not always even held at Donaueschingen, varied between 1927 and 1950, as might be expected; but in 1950 it was relaunched in collaboration, crucially, with the Südwestfunk Baden-Baden (which in 1998 merged with the Stuttgart equivalent to form the Südwestrundfunk). This partnership with a broadcaster not only enhanced funding and offered a means of disseminating events, but also placed an orchestra at the disposal of the festival. From 1950 to 1970 the programmes were assembled by Heinrich Strobel, director of music at Südwestfunk, who became one of the most influential names connected with new music. Under his directorship the festival became firmly associated with contemporary music, and from 1971 it became known as the ‘Donaueschinger Musiktage’.

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Strobel was succeeded by Otto Tomek and then in 1975 by Joseph Häusler, who also subsequently edited the collected writings of Lachenmann and Nicolaus A. Huber. Häusler’s account of the festival’s phases outlines the trajectory of new music in Germany: serialism in the 1950s, timbre and surface in the 1960s, and engagement with nineteenth-century tradition and tonality in the 1970s.43 Nevertheless, his depiction of the 1980s as being characterized by pluralism overlooks the discernible revitalization of modernism that occurred in that decade – even if it did so in a diverse environment. Armin Köhler took over from 1992, and with public sector money becoming tighter following reunification, 1996 saw a funding crisis at Donaueschingen after Südwestfunk announced it would need to cut its contribution by 50 per cent. Initially, it looked as if the festival would become biennial, but in the end it proved possible to retain it on an annual basis by securing a mix of private and state funding.44 Stockhausen was a major presence at the Donaueschinger Musiktage during the 1970s, a decade which saw premieres of Mantra (1970) and Inori (1974). Indeed, 1974 turned out to be a significant year not only because it witnessed Stockhausen taking a new direction, but also because it marked the emergence of his one-time student Rihm, with the premiere of his Morphonie, Sektor IV, which signalled a decisive move away from the post-war aesthetic. Premieres from early in the next decade included Lachenmann’s Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1980) and Boulez’s Répons (1981), and the end of the 1980s witnessed an increasing interest in the spatial music of Nono and Rihm. The latter’s monumental Klangbeschreibung triptych was performed in 1987 to overwhelmingly positive press responses, especially with regard to the strength and energy of the music. Two years later, Nono’s No hay caminos. Hay que caminar . . . Andrej Tarkowskij was considered to be the high point of the 1989 festival.45 Cologne came to be known colloquially as the capital city of new music due to the people and activities clustered there. Geographically, it had the advantage of proximity to Bonn, the West German capital, and was not so far from Darmstadt, with which it formed something of an axis. An important early factor in the consolidation of new music in Cologne was the presence there of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, which established an electronic music studio in 1951 under the direction of Herbert Eimert. He invited Stockhausen to join him as a collaborator in 1953, and the studio went on to become central to Stockhausen’s pioneering electronic music in the 1950s. Many other major figures from the time also worked there, and it proved essential to the multimedia scores of the Cologne resident Bernd Alois Zimmermann.46

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Beyond the electronic studio, producer Klaus Schöning established Westdeutscher Rundfunk as an important centre for exploring the radio play (Hörspiel) as a medium that combined speech, music and diegetic sound. Björn Heile makes the valid point that the Hörspiel, in which technical complexity tended to be a means to an end, offered an alternative to the culture of electroacoustic music, where the production process can become an end in itself.47 This new genre came into being in the late 1960s, with Kagel’s (Hörspiel) Ein Aufnahmezustand (A State of Recording, 1969), which took the process of making a documentary as its theme, setting a precedent. Kagel went on to play a pivotal role in the development of the medium, and he used the facilities of the related television station in, for instance, his film Ludwig van. As well as offering facilities for making music, Westdeutscher Rundfunk disseminated music through its influential concert series ‘Musik der Zeit’, founded in 1951, which featured prominent local composers such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Stockhausen and Kagel, as well as other major figures. Furthermore, Westdeutscher Rundfunk supported the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, which like Donaueschingen was a pre-war festival (founded in 1936) that became specifically a new music event, albeit one dedicated to chamber music. As well as being represented by concerts and broadcasts, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Stockhausen and Kagel were all, at some point in their careers, linked to the Cologne Hochschule. In association with this institution, Stockhausen established his Kölner Kurse für Neue Musik in 1963, with a view to providing more continuity than the Darmstadt courses could offer; and these programmes were directed by Kagel from 1969 to 1975. This enterprise was not, however, destined to become a permanent feature of the Cologne music scene, even though Stockhausen remained in the vicinity of the city for the rest of his life. He moved to a house of his own design near the village of Kürten in 1965, and from 1998 established courses in the locality devoted to the study of his own music which have continued after his death. As a mark of Stockhausen’s association with the region, in 2011 Cologne Opera premiered Sonntag, the immense final part of his Licht cycle. The influential scholar and critic Heinz-Klaus Metzger was based in Cologne as well, where he actively encouraged music that broke with convention. Moreover, it was in Cologne that Walter Zimmermann founded his Beginner Studio in 1977 (it lasted until 1984), in a former chemical factory, with the aim of performing contemporary American music ranging from experimental to free jazz. Although it was one of the few concert series at this time that was not associated with a radio station, local broadcasters including Westdeutscher Rundfunk did offer support by recording and transmitting concerts.

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The former West Berlin also provided opportunities for new music: the Deutsche Oper premiered Kagel’s lieder opera Aus Deutschland, Rihm’s music theatre piece Tutuguri and his opera Oedipus. The annual Berliner Festwochen, founded in 1951, offered possibilities before and after reunification. They now take place under the auspices of the Festspiel, which organizes a range of cultural events, and although the Festwochen are not specifically dedicated to new music, they do ensure that it is adequately represented.48 Tracking the broad curve of post-war new music, the Festwochen have featured the figures who became established in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as their successors. Henze was frequently represented, not least because he was favoured anyway by the Berliner Philharmoniker Orchester, and the 1990 festival focused on local resident Dieter Schnebel. In keeping with a perspective that is not restricted to new music, the 2011 Festwochen placed pieces by Rihm in general programmes so they were not isolated by the category of ‘new music’. After reunification, the federal structure of Germany continued to ensure that Berlin did not constitute the centre for everything, notably finance, where Frankfurt remained dominant. Nevertheless, as power moved away from Bonn to Berlin, so the latter became a more significant centre for new music. Amy Beal has argued convincingly that the years of German public arts funding during the Cold War proved important for American experimentalists from the early 1960s.49 Because these composers were somewhat outside the salaried American university system, they relied on commissions, for which there were more opportunities in Germany than at home. They were, then, partly dependent on a European model of public funding that was not favoured in the USA. One outcome of this situation was that American experimentalists, especially John Cage and Morton Feldman, assumed a higher profile in Germany than establishment composers such as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter. As an example of such support, in 1971 Feldman accepted an invitation from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst to be resident in West Berlin under its Artist-inResidence programme, and several concerts of his music were put on there during his stay.50 What is more, this European interest survived his death because his manuscripts were subsequently obtained by the Paul Sacher Foundation. Cage continued to attract attention after his visit to Darmstadt in 1958, even though he was not invited back during Thomas’s time as director there, and received several major commissions from Germany. For example, Klaus Schöning commissioned Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979) as a Hörspiel.51 As mentioned above, at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Schöning had cultivated the Hörspiel as a multimedia genre in

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which music and sound were as important as textual content, and had facilitated influential work from Kagel in the medium. Like Kagel, Cage was suited to the genre of the Hörspiel because he was attuned to the idea of making the idiosyncrasies of the medium central to the character of the outcome and to the way it would be received. During the 1970s Cage had written a series of mesostic poems: poems, that is, with a keyword in capital letters running through the middle of the typescript. The results included a series of readings of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, with the words ‘JAMES JOYCE’ forming a central column. Writing for the Second Time through Finnegans Wake constitutes the basis of Roaratorio, in which an expressionless reading of Cage’s mesostic text is heard amidst a jumble of the sounds that Joyce mentions in his novel. In fact the production of Roaratorio was sufficiently complicated to justify a French–German collaboration whereby Cage used the facilities at the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique Paris to mix down the sources to stereo tape for broadcast. With Roaratorio, Germany commissioned one of Cage’s major scores from the 1970s and it was to do so again in the 1980s, with Europeras 1 and 2 (1987). The Joyce-like compound Europera combines the words ‘Europe’ and ‘opera’, and it sounds like ‘your opera’ when spoken. Metzger had shown a keen interest in Cage since his first visit to Germany, and he had championed the American composer in the dispute following the latter’s visit to Darmstadt. It is interesting, though, that, in an article from 1959, he did so in a strongly European manner that paid little attention to the American dimension of Cage’s work.52 Metzger was able to put his appreciation to good effect by means of a commission during his term as artistic director, with Rainer Riehn, of the Frankfurt Opera, which was advantageously situated in Germany’s financial capital.53 In order to fulfil the commission, Cage plundered the New York Metropolitan Opera’s archives for repertoire that was out of copyright. He took sections from instrumental scores, combining them using chance procedures, and obtained arias to be sung in no particular order by the nineteen singers. In addition, he extracted sets and costumes from the archives and distributed them randomly, and organized lighting by chance operations that made any highlighting of a character accidental. Nevertheless, even Cage’s algorithms did not entertain the possibility that the Frankfurt Opera would burn down a few days before the scheduled premiere. When eventually performed, the Europeras played out a tension between the conventions of a genre associated with passion and the emotional detachment of automated procedures that were designed to defamiliarize learned responses. Interpreted one way, this contradiction amounts to indifference to tradition; construed the other way, it offers

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23

liberation from atrophied customs. The procedural emphasis of Europeras 1 and 2 is better compared with Kagel’s Staatstheater (1970) than with his later Aus Deutschland (1979), in which conventions are challenged by design. Metzger’s commission for an opera ensured that Cage engaged with the historical turn in Germany at the time, but by keeping the genre’s expressive resources firmly in check, the latter made sure that the outcome was suitably idiosyncratic.

Ensembles Contemporary music depends not only on a responsive cultural climate, but also on the accumulated expertise of ensembles dedicated to that repertoire. The Arditti Quartet was founded in 1974; it is based in London but plays in Germany more frequently than anywhere else, and it performs quartets by many of the composers covered in this study. The ensemble values individual preparation highly, so that all the players can be fully aware of one another in rehearsal instead of remaining immersed in the score. Normally, the composer will give advice on a new work and, where the music significantly extends the bounds of traditional notation, may well offer guidance from the start. The ensemble’s dedication is exemplified by their approach to Brian Ferneyhough’s Second String Quartet, of which Irvine Arditti comments: ‘We worked on that not bar by bar, but beat by beat, and I think in those days, in 1980, we spent about sixty hours learning the piece. It was some twelve minutes long.’54 In the course of such a process, problems are solved, procedures agreed, and conventions established which – though not beyond dispute – add much to the music that is not present in the notation. Tellingly, Ferneyhough comments that the Arditti Quartet was able to learn his Third String Quartet in a matter of weeks, having worked on his music before.55 The new music ensemble as an entity is generally considered to have its origin in Schoenberg’s Op. 9 Chamber Symphony (1906), in which instruments are treated more as individuals than as members of an orchestral section. Such groupings became commonplace during the wellresourced years of the post-war avant-gardes, and yet new music ensembles functioned on a somewhat ad hoc basis in those years. In Germany, it was not until the founding of Ensemble Modern in 1980 that a dedicated new music ensemble came into being. It was initiated by members of the German Youth Orchestra with the support of Reinhard Oehlschlägel (then producer of new music at Deutschlandfunk which was also based in Cologne), who saw it as an opportunity to establish a German equivalent to the London Sinfonietta, founded in 1968, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain,

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Music in Germany since 1968

instigated by Boulez in 1976.56 Ensemble Modern’s inaugural concert, given in Cologne, comprised Mathias Spahlinger’s Phonophobie for brass quintet, Friedrich Goldmann’s Concerto for trombone and ensemble, and Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony Op. 9. Nicolaus A. Huber wrote his 6 Bagatellen for the ensemble after this concert, and it was included on their first recording, along with Lachenmann’s Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung). Ensemble Modern now has an international mix of members, is based in Frankfurt and is run as a collective. It has worked with most of the major modernist composers and has collaborated with figures from a wider spectrum of music, most notably the rock musician Frank Zappa. The smaller Ensemble Recherche was set up soon after in 1985, and is based in Freiburg im Breisgau; it holds courses for performers and composers, and performs early music as well as new music. Musikfabrik was a later addition from 1991 and is based in Cologne; in 2011 it worked with Cologne Opera for the premiere of Stockhausen’s Sonntag aus Licht. Dedicated performance groups do not just respond to the needs of composers, they also enable new possibilities and foster an environment in which new music can thrive. The music discussed in this book depends on such commitment from performers.

2 Expanded horizons: established composers after 1968

Ligeti and Nono

[25]

One of the criteria outlined by Dahlhaus (as mentioned in the Introduction) for inclusion in the Deutscher Musikrat recording series Zeitgenössische Musik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland was citizenship of the Federal Republic of Germany, a condition which excluded György Ligeti (1923–2006). It is reasonable to draw a line somewhere, but the fact that Ligeti was discussed in the notes to the series indicates that his centrality to new music in Germany made the rule a difficult one to follow. As is well known, he was born in Hungary and spent his early career there before fleeing to the West and acquainting himself with recent developments during a residency in Cologne from 1957 to 1958. From 1959 he chose to be based in Vienna, eventually becoming an Austrian citizen, perhaps because it is close to Hungary and perhaps because being located there enabled him to keep the German new music scene at arm’s length. Nevertheless, he maintained an active presence at the Darmstadt summer courses during the 1960s, he was mainly resident in Berlin from 1969 to 1973, and from 1973 to 1989 he taught at the Hochschule in Hamburg, where he maintained an apartment even after retirement. Although of the same generation as Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen, Ligeti was associated with the Darmstadt composers of the 1960s, for the eminently practical reason that he was situated on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the formative years of the summer courses. While he was in Hungary, Ligeti maintained an interest in new music from western Europe but was obliged to conform to the folk-based style of composition advocated by the tenets of socialist realism. This situation led him to develop what might be called a double-consciousness as a way of translating between two sets of values. As Ligeti put it, ‘If someone like myself did not follow the political line of the day, then they were forced to stick to simpler educational works and arrangements of folk-songs.’1 It is reasonable to assume that comparable dual instincts served him well when he arrived in the West, where he managed to be at the centre of the avant-garde, and yet to retain an oblique perspective of his own with regard to serialism. Indeed, Ligeti commented of his Apparitions (1958): ‘I reacted to serial music just as I reacted to my own earlier compositional methods, rejecting it and at the

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same time building on it, modifying it.’2 This double-consciousness may have also helped him, although not without a struggle, to cultivate his personal response to the postmodernist critique of many of the founding principles of post-war modernism. Certainly what Richard Taruskin calls ‘the simultaneous escape into and escape from freedom’ that characterized Ligeti’s move from East to West was significant for what the same author describes as his ‘emblematic status’.3 Ligeti’s first major success was in 1961 with the texture score Atmosphères (a significant influence on Lachenmann), which adjusted the tenets of constructivist composition by using dense, imperceptible micro-canons to produce highly perceptible transformations in sonority. It was perhaps not surprising, given the hidden presence of contrapuntal techniques in this score, that Ligeti was subsequently to shape a trajectory that led from its vastly reduced resources to a gradual reclamation of rhythm, melody and pitch. Before he did that, however, there came a somewhat idiosyncratic reaction to the social upheaval of the 1960s by means of the influence of Cage, the Fluxus group and the associated medium of happenings. These stimuli were evident early in the decade in pieces such as the nearly silent Trois Bagatelles for piano (1961), which resemble Cage’s 4′33″, the bassheavy Fragment for ten players (1961) and the better-known Pòeme symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962), which caused a scandal. Along with the Dada-influenced Aventures (1962), these scores might be considered to be provocative. Nevertheless, they did not subvert convention with the rigour that was demonstrated by Ligeti’s friend Kagel; and they were not driven by the desire to change listening habits that was to become a defining characteristic of Lachenmann, who has accused Ligeti of merely shocking the bourgeoisie with such pieces.4 It was fitting, then, that Ligeti, in his response to the events of 1968, identified more with the hippy movement than with political attacks on institutions; indeed, he even went to the trouble of spelling out his opposition to the political turn in music at the 1972 Darmstadt summer course, as discussed in Chapter 1.5 Lontano (In the Distance, 1967) is an early indicator that the transition away from the values of post-war avant-gardism might lead to reconsideration of the relationship between structure and tradition. Speaking in 1968, the composer described the passage near the end of the score (starting at bar 145) in which the horns emerge from an abyss in the texture as having what he calls a ‘historical perspective’: embellishing the title of his score, he suggested that we hear late Romanticism at a distance in this segment of Lontano, which for him evokes moments in which horns are heard after a tutti in Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. He referred specifically to the coda of the slow movement from Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, about which he

Expanded horizons

27

made the interesting remark that it sounds like Bruckner recalling Schubert – a way of saying that it is itself already allusory. In a further twist, he proposed that the horns can be heard from long ago, which appears to mean that they are already a signifier of the distant and the past in Romantic music. These layered associations provide clear evidence of Ligeti unfolding hermeneutic as well as structural concerns. Crucially, he added: ‘I have a strangely two-edged, or enigmatic, relationship to tradition. On the one hand, I deny all musical tradition, and yet subliminally it continues to play a part.’6 The title of Melodien for orchestra (1971) is a strong indicator of how important the reappraisal of established musical elements was to him at that time.7 Ligeti also showed himself in the 1970s to be aware of tendencies that came to be considered as postmodernist: in ‘Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei)’, the second of three pieces for two pianos Monument – Selbstportrait – Bewegung (1976), he acknowledged, through a quirky version of phase shifting, the impact of minimalism. Given the neoRomantic tendency in German music at this time, the metrical reference to Chopin (who was also important in the later piano Études) is significant and indicative of the way Ligeti was to react primarily in structural terms to this tendency. The opera Le Grand Macabre (1977) is often considered to be an important part of the incremental process by which Ligeti reappropriated established musical language, mainly on account of its final scene – a passacaglia in which the quasi-serial organization generates consonant sixths and triads. Nevertheless, the completion of this opera also represented something of a creative barrier. The harpsichord pieces Hungarian Rock and Passacaglia ungherese from the following year (1978) marked the start of a fallow spell, during which the composer sketched for his much later Piano Concerto (1988). These two harpsichord pieces were intended as ironic responses to the committed tonalists among his students at the time, including the ones who took inspiration from rock, though the scores also clearly demonstrate the composer re-evaluating his Hungarian roots in a time of transition.8 The Horn Trio (1982), a genre for which there is a precedent by Brahms, is commonly regarded as a turning point in Ligeti’s oeuvre, and Richard Steinitz notes that it was openly attacked by Lachenmann for its abandonment of progressive ideals.9 Given that Ligeti understood the horns in Lontano as symbols of the past (as mentioned above), it is probably no coincidence that he chose this instrument as the medium through which to signal a more explicit engagement with tradition. The wonky horn fifths progressions heard in the opening violin double-stops, which constitute a motif in the piece, not only evoke classical horn writing, but also refer to

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Beethoven’s use of this gesture in his Les Adieux Sonata, thereby linking this music indirectly to the classical tradition. Further off-centre devices include the harmonics (in the horn) that are sprinkled throughout the score, and the hemiola patterns found in the second movement, which Ligeti links to the aksak (limping) dance rhythms of the Balkans.10 The final movement of the Horn Trio is a ‘Lamento’, signified by descending semitone patterns. With markings of ‘espressivo’ and ‘appassionato’, the music strays into the expressionist realm that Ligeti was otherwise inclined to resist, though significantly it is Bartók rather than Schoenberg to whom he turned. Although the Horn Trio was by no means written as a model for later pieces, it did offer a repository of ideas that were to return in different contexts. The Hamburg Concerto for horn and chamber orchestra (2000), for example, makes extensive use of hand-horn tuning in the solo and orchestral parts, and deviant tuning is also to be found in the Violin Concerto (1993). Moreover, versions of the ‘Lamento’ descending semitone idea from the last movement of the Horn Trio are to be found in later scores such as ‘Automne à Varsovie’ (‘Autumn in Warsaw’), the sixth of the first book of Études for piano (1985), the Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto and the Sonata for Viola Solo (1994). Finally, hemiola devices are a recurring feature of the Études for piano; more specifically, the exact ostinato pattern located in the second movement of the Horn Trio found its way into the fourth piano Étude, ‘Fanfares’, where it occupies every bar of the piece. The fanfare figures from the Étude relate to the same movement from the Horn Trio too, and they are characterized by pianistic shapes that also evoke horn writing. Examined harmonically, on paper the result appears to be triadic, tonal music, but the aural outcome is more ambiguous because the phrasing of the fanfare shapes is not synchronized with the 3 + 2 + 3 patterns of the ostinato. As Eric Drott writes, ‘The lack of variation in the ostinato reinforces the sense that the two parts proceed along separate tracks, diminishing the salience of any vertical formed by the coincidence of the two layers.’11 Consequently, the past is evoked more as a trace than as a controlling presence in this Étude, and the same might be said of much of Ligeti’s output following the transition that was marked by the Horn Trio. At the time that Ligeti was starting to work with triads again, a number of other influences were also finding their way into his music. One was Conlon Nancarrow’s music for mechanical piano, which by using patterns punched into paper rolls was able to achieve levels of polyrhythmic intricacy that surpass the capacities of human pianists. Another was the ‘meter-dependent hemiola as used by Schumann and Chopin’;12 and a further one was the additive pulsation principle that occurs in the polyphonic percussion playing of several sub-Saharan African nations, which is particularly evident

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in the metric layers of ‘Automne à Varsovie’. The point of all this is that, on the one hand, Ligeti evoked the tradition of the virtuosic piano étude, including its physiological patterns, and, on the other hand, he decentred the tonal expectations of this genre. (Other approaches to recontextualizing fingering pattern and hand shapes can be found in Lachenmann’s Ausklang and Kagel’s Passé composé.) Speaking in general about his Études, of which there were eventually eighteen, Ligeti commented: Yet my Études are neither jazz nor Chopinesque-Debussian music, neither African nor Nancarrow, and certainly not mathematical constructs. I have written of influences and approaches, but what I actually compose is difficult to categorize: it is neither avant-garde nor traditional, neither tonal nor atonal. And in no way postmodern, as the ironic theatricalizing of the past is quite foreign to me.13

Read in terms of the situation in Germany at the time, Ligeti was trying to articulate a stance that distanced him from post-war avant-gardism without associating his new orientation with the neo-Romantic tendency that had also challenged this heritage. And it is understandable that he would not have wished to be associated with a situation in Germany whereby historical reflection, following Habermas’s intervention (as discussed in Chapter 5), was considered to be a postmodernist form of new conservatism. In a different cultural climate, Ligeti might have conveyed his relationship to this tendency in a more nuanced manner, since his position was not so unlike that of his students: he too was looking for an escape from the serial legacy. In 1978 he articulated the dilemma as follows: I quite approve of the complete rejection of the last twenty years on the part of the younger composers. It is a healthy sign. However, I remain sceptical. It is all right rejecting what is past, but they should do something genuinely new, instead of returning to late-Romantic, pathos-filled German music.

For good measure, he also expressed his dislike of any ‘neo’ trend and added: ‘Several young composers who follow the trend are in my class, so many people believe that it is all my influence, but I categorically deny any such allegation.’14 In fact, he taught nearly all the main figures that were associated with neo-Romanticism (as detailed in the second section of Chapter 5), with the notable exception of Rihm, and made particular mention of Hans-Christian von Dadelson.15 Even though Ligeti was not responsible for the historical tendency, it is unlikely to be entirely fortuitous that so many figures associated with it were drawn to him. Perhaps they sensed a link to the

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past that would not have been so evident with, say, Stockhausen; perhaps they liked the fact that he was not linked with the modernism of the 1950s; and perhaps they perceived him to be the most high-profile person teaching in Germany at the time. Although he never made the connection publically, one thing he shared with his students was an interest in Schumann, as is already evident from discussion of the Études. In connection with this composer, he referred to the ‘meandering lines embedded in the texture’ and considered that this internal weaving ‘gives the impression of a musical form that has overflown the banks’.16 This language is uncannily similar to that used by Rihm in relation to his Fremde Szenen: despite the fact that Ligeti speaks primarily in terms of procedure whereas Rihm makes the link to subjectivity, both value instability in Schumann. In the same year as the Horn Trio, Ligeti also wrote Drei Phantasien nach Friedrich Hölderlin, for unaccompanied sixteen-part mixed chorus. This is a significant choice as well, for like Schumann this poet was widely valued as someone for whom the inward was a volatile emotion, a quality that led to his words being frequently set by composers in Germany at this time. Contrary to what he said (and what is now widely accepted) in an environment that was prone to make accusations of conservatism, it would seem that Ligeti did unwittingly contribute to the start of a historically reflective tendency, and that he did draw inspiration from this trend, even if he preferred stylistic impurity to the invocation of specifically German traditions. Just as his double-consciousness allowed him to be at a tangent to constructivism, so it also enabled him to achieve an idiosyncratic historical perspective that embraced a number of traditions, as Arnold Whittall argues in relation to the Viola Sonata.17 It is unlikely that Ligeti would have written the Horn Trio without the reappraisal of the past in Germany; indeed, he sounded very much like his students when he commented that he used traditional forms in this score ‘as a sort of rebellion against the established conventions of the avant-garde’.18 Furthermore, ‘Fanfares’ pursues tonal chord progressions to an extent that few pieces by Rihm (who at the time was more explicitly linked to such tendencies) can match, since the latter’s often more unambiguous tonal statements frequently occur in contexts that are not tonally organized, as demonstrated, for instance, in his Hölderlin-Fragmente. The point to draw from this comparison, however, is not that one approach is representative of a new conservatism and the other is progressive, but that in different ways both endeavour to create a rapprochement between modernism and tradition. There seems little doubt that Ligeti’s ‘Lamento’ movements strive to articulate the sort of emotional directness that was so important to the younger

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generation of composers, even though Ligeti was sceptical of their aims. The difference is that the latter sought to evoke a specifically German tradition, whereas Ligeti took a more oblique approach to this lineage and aimed concurrently to engage with eastern European music, as indicated when he talked of ‘nostalgia for a homeland that no longer exists’.19 For him, experiences of the past were intrinsically tied to the displacements he experienced as a result of fascist and communist regimes. Luigi Nono (1924–90) was a major figure at the Darmstadt summer courses during the 1950s and was frequently present in Freiburg im Breisgau during the 1980s, at the Heinrich Strobel Foundation’s Experimental Studio for Acoustic Arts. What, however, earns him a place in this book is that he taught Lachenmann and exerted a strong influence on Rihm in the 1980s. He has been paired with Ligeti because he is the other non-German composer in this chapter (Kagel became a German citizen), though they are opposites in the sense that Ligeti judged music to be non-political whereas Nono was the great political figure of the musical avant-garde. What the two composers do have in common are trajectories that changed courses in the 1970s and led to significant late styles in the 1980s, this final stage being especially influential in the case of Nono. Along with Boulez and Stockhausen, Nono was one of the pioneers of post-war seralism. His Il canto sospeso (1956) uses serial techniques to set the letters of condemned prisoners of the European resistance, but as the title ‘suspended song’ suggests, it retains traces of the lyrical vocal traditions associated with Italian opera. Nono parted company with Darmstadt in 1960, though 1959 was the year in which he gave a lecture that soured his relationship with the institution. Lachenmann, who was studying with Nono at that stage, is credited with ‘formulating’ the speech, a turn of phrase that implies he played an active role in writing a polemic that was presented in German. In response to Cage’s famous visit to Darmstadt in 1958, Nono argued that Cagean indeterminacy amounted to an abdication of responsibility, because it was delusional to believe that either sounds or the self could be detached from their historical situation.20 Not unpredictably, these sentiments proved sufficient to initiate a dispute with Stockhausen, who had adopted Cagean notions of open form. Subsequent to his departure from Darmstadt, Nono became the most politically committed composer of his generation: the stage work Intolleranza (1961), for instance, combines modernist music with direct theatrical presentation of the intolerance shown to immigrants. It did not take the events of 1968, therefore, for Nono to become interested in social change, although he did not hesitate to use the moment to advance the socialist cause. Musica-Manifesto no. 1: Un volto, del mare – Non consumiamo Marx

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for voices and tape (1969) contains recordings of protests by students, workers and intellectuals from June 1968 in Venice, as well as vocalized graffiti from the Paris demonstrations in May of the same year. In a comparable vein, Y entonces comprendió for six female voices, choir and tape (1970) is a celebration of the Cuban revolution that includes the voice of Fidel Castro reading his last letter to Che Guevara. These sympathies remained active in the theatre work Al gran sole carico d’amore (1975), which takes women’s revolutionary struggle as its topic and which, like Intolleranza, was conceived as ‘azione scenica’ (dramatic action). Nevertheless, this score was to prove a point of culmination after which Nono’s approach to composition changed substantially, at a time when it became difficult to retain belief in the revolutionary leaders of the 1960s. This shift is evident in . . . sofferte onde serene . . . for piano and tape (serene waves endured, 1976), composed for Nono’s friend Maurizio Pollini, who recorded the tape in the studio. It uses electronic resources not for political realism, but to expand the sonority of the piano by combining tape, which includes recordings of the instrument’s mechanism and which serves to elaborate pedal resonances, with live piano performance. In his programme note Nono quoted from Kafka on the necessity of the ‘equilibrium of the profound interior’ – an indication of the inward turn that was to mark his late work. He also acknowledged the influence on this music of the Venetian bells that reached his home from across the lagoon, and such floating sounds also became an important component of his late style.21 Sounds from nowhere – islands in space – are at the core of the landmark string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima (1980), one of the few works without electronics from Nono’s last decade. The significance of the shift in direction represented by this quartet was quickly recognized, with HeinzKlaus Metzger (who had turned against Nono after the Cage dispute) calling it an ‘intensification of his [Nono’s] identity’.22 The fragments and silences of the title are much in evidence in music that is predominantly quiet and often high – music that slows time and has a liminal existence. The score comprises fifty-two numbered fragments, amongst which the composer liberally sprinkled isolated lines from the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Nono was adamant that these quotations are not to be read out, recommending instead that ‘the players should “sing” them inwardly, in their autonomy, in the autonomy of sounds striving for a “delicate harmony of the inner life”’ (the quotation is taken from one of Hölderlin’s letters to Susette Gontard) – a quixotic instruction which appears to mean that the text fragments are intended to invoke an inward state.23 Hölderlin became something of a preoccupation in the second phase of new music, as already mentioned in the previous section on Ligeti. Nono

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would certainly have been familiar with Bruno Maderna’s ruminations on Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion from the mid 1960s. But it is likely that the strongest reason for his turn to the poet in the quartet was the friendship he formed with the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, who provided the texts for the later Prometeo. The fragments from Hölderlin that Nono inscribed in the score are so brief as to not make their origins immediately recognizable, though the composer’s list of sources reveals that the ‘Diotima’ poems feature strongly, as suggested by the quartet’s title.24 For Hölderlin, the name ‘Diotima’ was rich in resonances: it referred to Plato’s Symposium; it was the name he gave to a leading character in his novel Hyperion; and it was the name that became associated with Susette Gontard, with whom he had a relationship, the mother of the children he tutored and the wife of a Frankfurt banker. In the Diotima poems, and in those related to them, the idea of love became fused with nature and with the notion of the inner self.25 This is the perspective Nono evoked in his quartet, as indicated by the line ‘ . . . ins tiefste Herz . . . ’ (‘in the deepest heart’) quoted in the eleventh fragment. This ambience is reinforced by the application in several of the fragments of the Beethovenian marking ‘Mit innigste Empfindung’ (‘with inward feeling’), which is to be found in the middle movement of the Op. 109 piano sonata and in the last section of the ‘Heilige Dankgesang’ movement of the Op. 132 string quartet – in both cases in association with a cantabile melody. In Fragmente – Stille, the marking occurs several times in relation to occurrences of the same material, and in all but the first statement is connected with the final line of Hölderlin’s ‘Wenn aus der Ferne . . . ’ : ‘das Weisst aber du nicht’ (‘but as for that, You cannot know . . . ’).26 These passages stand out because they are bowed normally, in contrast to the extensive array of techniques used elsewhere, are marked ‘sotto voce’, are homophonic, are slow, and are usually distinguished by fading away, thereby creating a sense of inner stillness. It is likely that Nono was aware of the neo-Romantic tendency in Germany during the 1970s, and it is equally likely given his convictions that he rejected much for which it stood. To be sure, Fragmente – Stille does not adopt Romantic tonal gestures and it does not sound like neo-Mahler; the only quotation in the score is the mirage-like allusion to the Renaissance chanson ‘Malheur me bat’ that is sometimes attributed to Ockeghem. Nevertheless, Nono’s fixation on inwardness was in keeping with the desire for expressive communication that is clearly designated by the title of Rihm’s Third Quartet Im Innersten (In the Most Inward). Observing this shared preoccupation with inwardness, Hermann Danuser places quartets by Rihm and Nono in the category of ‘moderne’, as opposed to the categories of ‘meditative’ or ‘restituted tradition’.27 Likewise, it is also

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appropriate to note affinities between Rihm’s Hölderlin-Fragmente (1977), his Klavierstück Nr. 6 (1978) and Nono’s quartet because of their shared preoccupation with combining fragments paratactically (without transitions), and because of their sense of continuity across silences.28 Rihm was quick to realize the significance of Fragmente – Stille, perhaps because he recognized features in common, as was demonstrated in comments published in 1984 that say as much about himself as about the quartet. He wrote: ‘The form of the shape enables the surrounding nothingness to become a shape itself and the shape to lose its shape, and so on, until a vibration arises – experienced haptically as sculpture!’29 This description provides a dynamic understanding of the silences in Nono’s score that appears to be influenced by Rihm’s endeavours in the 1970s to combine moment-form with the Romantic fragment. It also relates the score’s shapes to concepts that are more indicative of Rihm’s work from the 1980s, notably the haptic – which Rihm elsewhere associates with a plastic conception of sound – and the sculptural. Although Rihm anticipated aspects of Fragmente – Stille, it may still have taken the experience of Nono’s quartet for him to become aware of silence as a shaped presence, and for him to formulate the idea of a message sent and received across space that is perceived as an object. His reception of Nono enabled him, therefore, to explore latencies in his own music. Composed shortly after Fragmente – Stille, Nono’s Das atmende Klarsein for small chorus, bass flute, live electronics and tape (Breathing Clarity of Being, 1981) was the result of work at the Freiburg studio, in co-operation with an associated group of performers. The title, taken from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, evokes the score’s floating vocal textures and its electronically modified bass flute sounds (including breathing and fingering), both of which herald the sound world of Prometeo, the central score of the 1980s. Prometeo, Tragedia dell’ascolto (Prometheus, Tragedy of Listening, 1985) does not conform to a genre other than that of music theatre loosely defined. It is derived from a libretto by Massimo Cacciari based on the myth of Prometheus, although it eschews narrative direction in favour of reflections on the god who brought fire to humankind at a terrible personal cost. The story of Prometheus is already tragic, but Nono’s preference for the domain of sound over the medium of theatrical representation implies an additional tragic understanding of the gap between what sound appears to promise and what reality actually delivers. The work unfolds at a predominantly slow tempo through timbral associations, making use of high vocal textures, microtonal inflections and electronic modifications. As in Fragmente – Stille, the libretto includes texts that are to be absorbed, or contemplated, by performers instead of being sung or recited. Even those passages that are performed are often so broken up phonetically that

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their meanings remain latent. Prometeo’s sources, which strongly reflect Cacciari’s interests, include classical authors such as Euripides, Aeschylus and Hesiod. They also extend to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, with its themes of redeeming past suffering and of breaking open the continuum of history. This essay forms the basis of Cacciari’s prose poem ‘Il maestro del gioco’, which offers a means for reflecting on the mythological material. The sources encompass Hölderlin too: in the middle of the score there is a section entitled ‘Hölderlin’ that takes a strophe from Hyperions Schicksaalslied; the scoring is for two soprano soloists, one male and one female speaker, bass flute, contrabass clarinet and electronics. In this segment the music is continuous and squeezed by overlapping swelling and receding dynamics. The lettering of the words is written to indicate emphases, the main idea being that of falling blindly from cliff to cliff like water. If Hölderlin is a signifier of inwardness here, therefore, that state is not conveyed as one of tranquillity. The text areas in the score are designated as islands, and this principle extends to the spatial layout of four orchestral groups, soloists, chorus and loudspeakers in the auditorium – an idea that also influenced Rihm. For the premiere at the church of San Lorenzo, Venice, the architect Renzo Piano designed an arc-like construction inside the auditorium in order to accommodate these distributed performance requirements. This spatial dimension of the score is intrinsic to the way it conveys its concern with the surfacing and receding memories of the founding myths of western civilization. Prometeo’s hovering electronics, its shimmering textures and its mythological material might appear to offer a message that is more transcendental than political, and it is possible to hear the work in this way. However, Nono is concerned not so much with the immutability of myth as with the idea of Prometheus as ‘a hope for a change in relationships’, one that is rooted in the idea of altered perception.30 The dispersal of performers in Prometeo is also a feature of No hay caminos, hay que caminar . . . Andrej Tarkowskij for seven instrumental groups (1987). This title is taken from an inscription found on a cloister wall in Toledo, which in full means ‘wayfarers, there are no ways, only faring on’; and the same aphorism occurs in the title of Nono’s last work Hay que caminar soñando for two violins (1989). The idea of a journey without established paths offers some insights into Nono’s turn away from overt political themes in favour of what Lachenmann describes as the search for a form of perception able to perceive itself.31 Building on this idea, he writes:

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The silence into which Nono’s late works lead us is a fortissimo of agitated perception. It is not the sort of silence in which human searching comes to rest, but rather one in which it is recharged with strength and the sort of restlessness which sharpens our senses and makes us impatient with the contradictions of reality.

Instead of ‘skilful metier’, he adds, the older Nono valued ‘direct, unprotected creative access’.32 Interestingly, in this heartfelt tribute to his teacher, Lachenmann indirectly recalls the lecture he formulated in 1959 by arguing that Nono, unlike Cage, at no point forgot the historicity of his material.33 In addition, he draws himself more directly into his homage to Nono by referring to a realm of agitated perception, one of his abiding concerns, and indicating that the ideal extends beyond the specific techniques used by either him or his former teacher. The line that Nono quoted from Robert Musil in connection with Das atmende Klarsein is applicable to both figures: ‘If there is a sense of reality, then there must also be something that can be called a sense of possibility.’34

Kagel and Schnebel Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008) is an interesting figure through whom to trace increasing engagement with the past, because his eclectic tendencies were never confined by a narrow understanding of musical material. Born and educated in Argentina, he retained a certain detachment from European modernism and from the European canon, and yet he quickly established himself at the heart of the new music scene in Cologne after his arrival there in 1957. Only four years older than Lachenmann, he became prominent sooner than the German composer. The instrumental theatre piece Sonant for guitar, harp, double bass and drums (1960) brought attention to its composer through its focus on the physical dimension of performance. The film Ludwig van: Ein Bericht (1969), commissioned and broadcast by Westdeutsches Fernsehen for the Beethoven bicentenary, takes as its principal topic the institutionalization of Beethoven. Kagel says of the camera in the music room scene that it ‘represents the eyes of the spectator Beethoven’,35 and it seems reasonable to assume that this principle applies elsewhere in the film. It is, perhaps, because Beethoven is the spectral cameraman that the character has such a shadowy visual existence, represented by no more than stockinged calves, buckled shoes and gloved hands. As the subtitle (‘a report’) suggests, there is something of a documentary about the film, except that the notion of Beethoven-as-spectator only partly compensates for the conspicuous absence of a narrating voice. In its place,

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the underscore offers substantial excerpts from Beethoven’s oeuvre which, as Björn Heile notes, perform a voiceover function.36 Much of the music was arranged by Kagel, so as to remove the gloss of professional recordings and thereby to place the associated industry under scrutiny. At the time, vinyl LP production was at its peak, strongly represented in West Germany by the full, rich sound of the Berlin Philharmonic, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan. Indeed, in Kagel’s staging of a topical TV discussion show, the link is made by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, who argues that Karajan’s pursuit of beauty masks the critical impulse in Beethoven. Early in the film, the Beethoven character arrives by train in his native Bonn. As he wanders around the city, the soundtrack plays an arrangement of the scherzo from the Ninth Symphony, which sounds as if it is being performed by a town band; and this everyday feel is further enhanced when footage of a street musician playing a zither is worked into the underscore. Before long, the character arrives at a record store, and after browsing the display of Beethoven recordings in the shop window, he enters the building and joins customers listening to LPs through telephone connections. The tinny sound on the film soundtrack indicates that, as viewers, we too are listening diagetically to those headphones which are playing the scherzo from the Ninth Symphony – only this time not in an arrangement by Kagel. The next scene includes footage from a record factory, serving to drive home the point that these prestige objects are mass-produced. The relevance of Beethoven’s humanist vision comes under scrutiny in the controversial final scene which juxtaposes the ‘Seid umschlungen’ section from the finale of the Ninth and the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio with unflattering images of zoo animals. This sequence might serve to debunk notions of the brotherhood of man, or it might be a reminder that even the most exalted ideas cannot be detached from the fact that humans, too, are animals with biological needs. There are also more specific political themes at work in the film: Kagel alludes to the appropriation of Beethoven by the Third Reich by envisaging the guide (Führer) to the Beethoven House as having a likeness to an ageing version of Hitler: ‘Under the stiff cap, a shock of light grey hair falls across the right eyebrow. Even the tiny, rectangular moustache has become almost white.’37 Like its guide, the Beethoven House is in a state of decay: the scores in the attic fall down when the door is opened and the bath is full of Beethoven busts made of chocolate-covered fat or marzipan. The artists involved in creating rooms for the Beethoven House included Ursula Burghardt, who designed the living room and garden (and who was married to Kagel), and Joseph Beuys – the most prominent artist in West Germany at the time – who created the kitchen (and who also appears

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in the film, wearing a Napoleon mask). Kagel himself devised the music room, in which the walls and furniture, including the music stand, are plastered with fragments of Beethoven’s scores. As the camera pans around the room, we hear the segments being shown, which sometimes only amount to a single instrumental line. The score of Kagel’s Ludwig van, Hommage von Beethoven (1970) was assembled from close-up shots taken in this room, so that the extent of a portion might, for example, be determined by the shape of a chair-back; these excerpts, the composer indicated, can be played in any order. Instead of the expected ‘homage to Beethoven’ the subtitle reads ‘homage by Beethoven’, a formulation which has the effect of unsettling the category of authorship so that it cannot easily be applied to either Kagel or Beethoven. This shift in perspective is, however, in keeping with Kagel’s view that ‘the music of the past should also be performed as music of the present’.38 In West Germany, critical opinion was divided, but in East Germany, Ludwig van the film was unconditionally condemned for its anti-humanist blend of capitalist leisure industry and modernism.39 Ludwig van is an important transitional work because, on the one hand, it embodies, by means of irony aimed at a dominant institutionalization of the composer, the aesthetic of an avant-garde wary of the past, and, on the other hand, it acknowledges, through creative montage, that the past offers a repository of meanings that can be actively engaged. The possibilities for reinterpretation suggested by this film (and score) are now more valuable than its transgressions, because market forces turned out to be a more efficient tool for attacking the cultural supremacy of bourgeois music than experimental art. The year 1970 also witnessed another milestone in Kagel’s career, Staatstheater, which is divided into nine scenic compositions, any of which can be performed separately, or even simultaneously. The title refers to the theatre found in most German towns and cities where opera is staged, and thereby initiates contact between Kagel’s work in the medium of music theatre and the conventions of opera. Repertoire, the first of this chain of compositions, involves performing theatrical actions with objects such as plastic tubing, table-tennis balls and a vinyl LP that are illustrated in the score by means of basic diagrams resembling those found in flat-pack furniture. By contrast, Ensemble consists of a number of pieces which might be considered to be solo arias, not least on the basis of Kagel’s suggested characterizations in the score: soprano 1, Queen of the Night; soprano 3, Aida; and tenor 3, Siegfried. The soloistic nature of these numbers is, however, substantially undermined by the title of the piece, which is consistent with the fact that these voices can also be combined. More specific operatic parodies, such as Lohengrin arriving on a large

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swan-wagon, take place in Saison. The overall impression is one in which the signifying mechanisms of operatic traditions are consistently blocked and diverted. Kagel’s ‘lieder opera’ Aus Deutschland (1979), which was commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin and premiered in 1981, marks a major point not only in his oeuvre, but also in his more general re-engagement with tradition during the 1970s and 1980s. It pushes beyond Staatstheater’s concentration on the procedures of opera by invoking its meanings as well, though it does so through the lens of the lieder tradition. Aus Deutschland draws on Liszt’s insight that Schubert’s lieder could be understood as ‘miniature operas’,40 extending the idea so that the subjectivities of the genre become physical stage characters. Moreover, it is not just the personae from these poems (and their associated songs) who are embodied: their authors appear too, notably Schubert and Goethe. Major sources include Schubert’s Die Winterreise (Wilhelm Müller), his ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Johann Goethe), his ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (Matthias Claudius), his Mignon settings (Johann Goethe) and Schumann’s Dichterliebe (Heinrich Heine). Aus Deutschland relies on a general expectation that some of these settings will be known, even though it offers little by way of orientating musical quotations. The derivation is more explicit in the libretto, which was assembled from existing texts – possibly explaining why the score is dedicated to Heine – although these sources are broken up and mixed in a kind of cut-and-paste operation that chops across the original sensibilities. Narrative momentum is always something of a problem in opera since arias are primarily expressive devices, and so, given Kagel’s deconstructive instincts, it was no surprise that his approach to the libretto was one that exposed this fault line by providing a series of tableaux (modelled on the Baroque idea of the tableau vivant) which eschew an underlying plot.41 Appropriately for a lieder opera, pianos (the second in the pit) function centrally in the score, sometimes expanded by an ensemble. For Kagel, they also reflected his experience as a rehearsal pianist in Buenos Aires and contributed to a sense of the provisional in the opera. The sketch folders for Aus Deutschland contain a number of newspaper clippings (some of which found their way into the programme book for the Berlin production), which indicate that Kagel drew more on general perceptions of the era than on detailed scholarship. These sources place particular emphasis on Hölderlin’s Hyperion, who appears as a character in the opera (accompanied by four horns as symbols of Romanticism), and on the Biedermeier period, which provides the setting for Kagel’s Schubertiade.

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The first tableau opens with the ‘Leiermann’ character, based on the hurdy-gurdy man whose drone symbolizes death from the final song of Winterreise.42 He is introduced by some of Müller’s lines, which create the setting of the village and the shunned outsider, and by a recorded barrel organ heard from the wings. He does not appear alone, though, since Kagel took the opportunity to present, initially by means of off-stage howls, the dogs that growl around him. The ‘Leiermann’ character and his dogs are also present in tableau 3, this time in the company of words from ‘Gute Nacht’, the opening song of Winterreise. Goethe materializes as a persona in tableau 6, wearing a brimmed hat and sitting in the posture of the painting ‘Goethe in Campagna’ by J. H. W. Tischbein. He sings words from Schubert’s ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meine Ruh’ ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer’, to a piano octave tremolo with a slight resemblance to the song’s busy, spinning accompaniment. These lines are from Goethe’s Faust, where they invoke Gretchen’s fraught recollection of Faust’s kiss, and so by giving them to a staged Goethe, Kagel made explicit the implicit idea that their author wrote them from the perspective of an imagined female subject-position. Goethe works at his spinning-wheel in the transition to tableau 7 and continues to do so in the background during the scene, in which we meet ‘Dichterin’, who provides a female counterpart to the ‘Dichter’ Goethe. A further clue to her identity is found in the words she sings from the fourth song of Dichterliebe (‘Wenn ich in deine Augen seh’), which, like those from ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, express a combination of desire and frustration. The implication, then, is that Dichterliebe has now become ‘Dichterinliebe’, with what was male heterosexual desire now articulated by a woman – one moreover whose vocal line moves in semitone patterns with a consistency that prevents it from becoming fully Romantic. Additional connotations and complications are created by the piano part: first, it is disorienting because it closely resembles, especially in the visual appearance of the notation, the shapes and gestures of the accompaniment not to Schumann’s song, but to ‘Ständchen’ (‘Serenade’) from Schubert’s Schwanengesang; and second, it generates more uncertainty by rejecting the tonal idiom these patterns evoke. The songs heard in tableaux 6 and 7 express desire for an absent character; but as tableau 7 progresses, the situation develops into a duet between Goethe and the ‘Dichterin’, still over the ‘Ständchen’ accompaniment, with Goethe eventually copying her melody and the ‘Dichterin’ finally abandoning poetic restraint by imploring him to pleasure her. There is, therefore, considerable mobility of desire and identity in these two tableaux, which build on an inherent flexibility in a genre where the

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same song may be performed by either a male or a female singer. There is also a precedent in the genre for even a single performer to be expected to personify more than one character, as demonstrated by Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, where the narrator, father, son and earl king are all given vocal identities. Furthermore, this idea of role-play can cross gender, as Lawrence Kramer points out in relation to ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’, where the ‘Mädchen’ is required to take on the voice of death (which is male by convention) in a different register.43 The trans-gender idea is also very much evident in the portrayal of Mignon (21 and 22), a character taken from Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which was the source of several Mignon settings by Schubert and by other composers including Wolf. In Aus Deutschland she is played by a counter-tenor ‘depicted as a maid with blond curls and white dress’, a device that not only draws on a certain pliancy of identity in the lied but also invokes the traditions of cross-dressing that are found in opera and pantomime. Initially Mignon is silent, as the emphasis is on scene changes with a recapitulatory role, which coincide with her turning the pages of a book, and which extend well beyond the technical constraints of established opera. When she does sing (22), she does so with a harmonica (which Kagel specifies should be a model called the ‘little lady’) in her mouth, and this image is supported by the sound of that instrument from the pit. Finally, a grey-haired Mignon-double emerges later in the scene, indicating that gender is not the only aspect of self under scrutiny here. Other Schubertian figures who appear on stage enact what Kagel considered to be the main Romantic themes of love, death, nature and escapism. These personae are taken from the songs ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ (10), ‘Die Nacht’ (11) and ‘Der Rattenfänger’ (13), the last of which provides Kagel with the opportunity to include a chorus of rats. Schubert himself takes to the boards in tableau 15: it is set in a Biedermeier-Salon and the scene is modelled on the Schubertiade, a form of domestic music-making depicted in paintings from the time. Accordingly, the ‘Kammersänger’ stands in the middle of the room surrounded by listeners, and the Schubert character is seated at the piano playing virtuosic arpeggiated patterns, although Kagel commented that ‘a few wrong notes are perhaps unavoidable’. Schubert also appears in the concluding tableau, this time in heaven as part of the set, in a grand finale that brings back many of the personae encountered earlier in the opera. There is no doubt that in this final scene Kagel caricatured a reception history of Schubert that renders him part of the Establishment. Equally, there is no doubt that Kagel as a critical observer of the Austro-German tradition valued the huge range of subjectivities found in Schubert’s songs, many of

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which challenge bourgeois norms by depicting social outsiders. Certainly, the milieu of Aus Deutschland supports the idea that the composers, poets and performers of the lied perform cultural work by not just reflecting, but by also imagining modes of subjectivity. At the same time, Kagel subjected the apparatus of the inner self to interrogation in Aus Deutschland, by presenting it more as a set of codes than as something inherent, and by damaging its mechanisms through the detached application of serialist principles. The music, especially that of the accompaniments, adopts the patterns and shapes of the genre, but it blocks their tonal associations in an uncompromising manner. Significantly, the opera was written in the same year as Rihm’s Neue Alexanderlieder, a set of songs that endeavours not to distance the expressive devices of Romantic subjectivity, but to redirect them. Kagel said of Kantrimusik (1975) that ‘the supposition of the piece is that the apocryphal has become the authentic’.44 The idea of speaking through another voice was already familiar from the Ludwig van projects, but the idea of the apocryphal took the proposition further because that other voice then became an unreliable source. Although Kagel formulated the concept in 1975, Heile is right to argue that it was applied more consistently after about 1985. This was the year in which Kagel applied the idea on a large scale in the Sankt-Bach-Passion, in which it is the life of the composer that unfolds, with Bach himself appearing as a speaker.45 Much of Kagel’s earlier work was about exposing the institutions and discourses of bourgeois music. At the end of the century, the purpose of such an uncompromising stance became less evident because by this time classical music was characterized more by its fragility than by its omnipotence. In these circumstances, the notion of the apocryphal enabled something of a reconciliation with established musical gestures, even though it rendered vague the provenance of these shapes by invoking genres more than the particular devices that are associated with individual composers. Furthermore, any reconciliation with convention that the apocryphal as an aesthetic tool did achieve served simultaneously to query the reliability and authenticity of the memories evoked. The idea found in Aus Deutschland of using the piano as a bridge to the past is also evident in scores for solo piano, such as An Tasten, Klavieretüde (1977), which uses tonal chords to revisit the genre of the technical piano study, and the more ambitious Passé composé, KlavieRhapsodie (1993) which evokes the apocryphal in its title. At its most basic level, ‘passé composé’ is the French term for the perfect tense, though Kagel uses a more lengthy grammatical definition to stress the idea of relating the past to the present. Translated literally it means ‘composed past’, which is in keeping with Kagel’s suggestion that the score is ‘a piece of musical

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reflection on the rhapsodic labyrinths of memory’.46 A glance at the notation immediately evokes the swoops of Romantic piano music, with some Debussy included for good measure. Nevertheless, the music does not quite sound as expected because the tonal gestures are organized by serially derived procedures, and the two systems do not mesh. Heile’s general observation that works from this period present themselves ‘like collages masquerading as organic artworks’ is certainly applicable to this score.47 A virtuosic piece, it places much emphasis on repeated figures, sometimes on one note, cross-rhythms, fingering patterns (a feature it shares with Lachenmann’s Ausklang) and pianistic shapes. The passage starting at bar 229 serves as an example of the ways in which this music creates conflicting responses: it evokes a grandioso theme and texture (possibly the second subject from Liszt’s B minor Sonata) characterized by a preponderance of B♭ major and what might be interpreted as G♭ appoggiaturas, and yet defamiliarizes this gesture by means of a composite melody line that is not tonally regulated (Ex. 2.1). At the end of the piece, the passé composé idea receives another twist: Kagel requires that a recording device is attached to the piano so that one of a number of specified ‘soft, transparent’ sections can be recorded during performance. The tape is then to be played back during the decay of the Ex. 2.1 Mauricio Kagel, Passé composé, KlavieRhapsodie, bars 229–34

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sustained last chord of the piece (the pianist is required to ‘freeze’), so that live resonance and a recorded past are combined. Commenting on the playback equipment, Kagel says in the score: ‘It is precisely the imperfect sound of the built-in loudspeaker [as opposed to additional amplifier and speakers] that best corresponds here to the atmosphere of “indefinite past”.’ The use of this device serves, therefore, to ensure that the dialogue of past and present takes place not just between this piece and its precursors but also within its own confines. In doing so, it also blurs the boundary between what is often considered to be the immediacy of live performance and the mediation of recorded reproduction. Kagel’s idiosyncratic combination of eclecticism and serially derived techniques resisted standard categories: on the one hand, his pluralism confounded the modernist emphasis on procedure; on the other hand, his application of abstract processes frustrated the postmodernist expectation of accessibility. His underlying approach was one of trying out ideas to see if they worked, with the inevitable result that some were more successful than others. Kagel shared the desire of the post-war avant-garde to move away from the conventions of bourgeois music, but to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries he did this by unpicking those practices in order to reveal the mechanisms by which they created emotional effects. The intrinsic drawback to this endeavour was that the process of mercilessly exposing the machinery of transcendence and depth greatly reduced the prospect of realigning ideas in unexpected ways.48 Nevertheless, in Aus Deutschland Kagel drew on meanings in a manner that was lacking in Cage’s Europeras, where computergenerated operations ensure consistent detachment. The tradition that Kagel did preserve, perhaps inadvertently, in the advent of the digital age was one in which objects were handmade and low-tech. Dieter Schnebel (b. 1930) is associated with the group of composers who rose to prominence in the early 1960s, such as Kagel and Berio. He has consistently stressed the importance for him of Cage’s 1958 visit to the Darmstadt summer courses, and was clearly influenced by the prospect of freeing sounds, by the idea of listening to everyday noises, and by the whole notion of the concept-composer. Schnebel is a distinctive presence on the new music scene because he has not only studied and taught theology, he has also practised as a minister. This aspect of his life is evident in the sacred texts used in the set of works für stimmen ( . . . missa est),49 written from 1956 to 1969, and in glossolalie (1960), which embodies the state of ‘glossolalia’ whereby people (apparently) speak in unknown tongues when in a condition of heightened religious fervour. Schnebel correlates sounds with corporal actions, seeking what Ulrich Dibelius called an inherent repertoire of ‘slumbering, unfiltered pre-cultural

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trace elements and their psychic associative correlates’.50 This preoccupation is evident in his collection of Maulwerken (Mouth Works, 1968–74) for between three and twelve amplified vocalists. In fact, Schnebel scores for what he dubs ‘Artikulationsorgane’, by which he means activities generated by breath, by throat and vocal cord tensions, by mouth formations, and by movements of the tongue and lips,51 conveying instructions for these prelinguistic utterances mainly graphically. He is keen too that the movements that create these sounds are part of what he calls a ‘theatre of human articulation’, suggesting they can be highlighted through the use of spotlights or even video cameras. He introduces his account of the Maulwerken scores with a discussion of the 1968 situation, on the basis that it raised the expectation of new music having a social meaning. His implied response to this challenge, which was less political than other reactions, was that the Maulwerken achieve ‘quasi direct expression’ by avoiding the codes of language or musical syntax. Interestingly, he drew this conclusion at about the same time that Derrida reached the opposite view in his deconstruction of Jacques Rousseau’s advocacy of the primacy of the voice in music.52 Approached from this perspective, the corporality advocated by Schnebel reinstates the sort of presence that Derrida finds so problematic. Nevertheless, the situation is not straightforward because, despite their advocacy of essence, the Maulwerken scores have a deconstructive dimension as well, because they deploy sounds – more easily heard when supported by a microphone – that are excluded by standard conceptions of vocality. Indeed, their medium is what Roland Barthes called the ‘grain of the voice’: the acknowledgement of the body in the production of sound. More generally, Schnebel summarizes an approach in which sounds are linked to observed corporal actions with the term ‘visible (sichtbar) music’. This perspective is congruent with the emphasis on kinesis in Kagel, although the latter’s relentless unpicking of conventions did not seek solace in pre-linguistic gestures. Anyway, Kagel would certainly have been on Schnebel’s mind when he formulated the idea of visible music because in 1970 he published a book entitled Mauricio Kagel: Musik – Theater – Film. The prominence given to normally excluded sounds in Schnebel’s conception of music also places him in the more unexpected company of Lachenmann, though the latter takes a more considered approach to structuring timbre. Finally, perhaps because of his religious interests, Schnebel has found himself less at odds than have many of his contemporaries with Stockhausen’s notion of intuitive music. The concept of visible music is in keeping with avant-gardist attempts to strip away the expressive conventions of the bourgeois heritage. However,

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like most composers in Germany at the time, Schnebel started to engage with that tradition in the 1970s, with a group of scores that were originally called Bearbeitungen (Rearrangements) but were later renamed as ReVisionen. The first set of Re-Visionen, mainly from the 1970s, reflect on scores by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Webern; the second set, mainly from the 1980s, refer to short moments from Mahler, Mozart, Schumann and Verdi. As the title ‘Re-visions’ suggests, these pieces are critical arrangements of existing scores that are designed to bring out, or reconfigure, certain elements for the present. In his introduction to the series, Schnebel writes not only of chipping away at calcified conventions, but also of tapping into the potential of the past. He concludes: ‘So the task would be to drill through to layers which we are only now in a position to appreciate or which seem to us contemporary.’53 The most substantial and significant of the Re-Visionen is SchubertPhantasie, originally from 1978 and subsequently revised in 1989, which is derived from the first movement of Schubert’s Piano Sonata in G major Op. 78, D894. According to Schnebel, the word ‘Phantasie’ appeared in older editions of Schubert’s sonata, and he restored the term because he found it suggestive for the way that structures dissolve and regroup in this score. Schnebel’s sketches for the 1978 version include a marked copy of Schubert’s first movement,54 which amounts to an analysis conceived mainly in terms of themes and associated dynamics, with little attention paid to structural unfolding. (Schnebel changed Schubert’s dynamics in his arrangement, but it seems likely that his analytical attention to this area was reflected by the way that sounds emerge and recede in Schubert-Phantasie in the stratum of the score he calls ‘Blendwerk’). By approaching the movement in this way, Schnebel made a virtue of what would be seen to be a weakness from a perspective that values a more driven, typically Beethovenian approach to sonata form. This perspective is consistent with his suggestion that ‘an imaginary spectrum carries through the whole first movement’ and with his conclusion that the movement is a ‘tone-colour composition’. The latter preoccupation is immediately evident in the scoring for what he calls ‘analytical instrumentation’, as exemplified by the way the closed rocking motion of the opening theme is intoned by the horn quartet and its scalic upbeat is played by a shimmering C trumpet (Ex. 2.2).55 The most striking feature of the score, however, is Schnebel’s attempt to realize what he refers to as its ‘imaginary spectrum’ by means of thirty-one strings, which sustain what he deems to be ‘a background and substratum of sound’, which also exists as an independent composition.56 Schnebel calls this layer Blendwerk, a term perhaps best understood if the translation as ‘illusion’ is tempered by bearing in mind that the noun ‘Blende’ means a screen or blind.

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Ex. 2.2 Dieter Schnebel, Schubert-Phantasie, bars 5–8

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The Blendwerk blurs the G major of Schubert’s sonata form with a seventh chord on A, the resulting haze forming a sonority that is sustained continuously throughout the piece. It is not, however, a uniform strand because the chord includes quarter-tone shifts and semitone glissandi, which build on the sliding lower-neighbour idea in the first subject. There is also a sense of motion and phasing in the Blendwerk that is indicated by graphic notation showing which textures and notes should emerge and recede. However, these fluctuations take place within confines, generating an almost electronic sound that brings out the sense of stasis in the Schubert. The first time the exposition is heard, only the Blendwerk is played; in the repeat, it continues through the orchestrated Schubert. Schnebel describes the effect well, commenting that the Blendwerk ‘equally generates the background of the Schubert texture as well as a veiling or obscuring foreground’.57 It is as if the Schubert emerges out of this energy field and then recedes back into it. By building on the attribute of stasis in the first movement of Schubert’s G major sonata, Schnebel augments its departure from the Beethovenian model of dynamic subjectivity. If the Maulwerken attack the conventions of bourgeois music, Schubert-Phantasie uncovers a hidden latency in them. In this sense, like Kagel and Rihm, Schnebel offers a critical reading of Schubert for the present, although his realization of an imagined space within the music suggests something less malleable than the fluid semiotic conventions other composers extract from Schubert.

Fig. 1 Dieter Schnebel at the 32nd Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1984.

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Zimmermann, Killmayer and Bredemeyer These composers are grouped together because they all maintained some distance from the most formalist applications of serialism: Zimmermann and Killmayer chose to retain ties to older traditions and Bredemeyer worked in the cultural sphere of East Germany. About a decade older than Boulez, Stockhausen and Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70) tends to be described as between generations, mainly because he did not attach himself to any dominant trends. He attended the pioneering years of the Darmstadt summer courses and adopted serial techniques, but he preferred to adapt the latter to his own ends. Even though his lifespan only overlaps with the framework of this book by two years, Zimmermann’s willingness to engage with the past provided a vital precedent for later music; and besides, Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, premiered shortly before he took his own life, provides an unparalleled perspective on the late 1960s. He is best known for his opera Die Soldaten (1958–64), which continues in the expressionist vein of Berg’s Wozzeck and which is famous for its ambitious representation of scenes simultaneously. The libretto is based on the eponymous play by the poet and playwright Jakob Lenz (1751–91), who anticipated the Sturm und Drang movement. This expressionist vein was picked up in the 1970s by Rihm, who wrote a chamber opera based on the life of Jakob Lenz that was, like Wozzeck, derived from a play by Georg Büchner. It was not just expressionism, though, that was informative for Rihm, because there are also some affinities between Rihm’s approach to inclusivity and Zimmermann’s style of pluralism, as exemplified in Die Soldaten by the second scene of Act II, where the seduction of Marie is accompanied, in one layer of the musical fabric, by the chorale ‘Ich bin’s, ich sollte büßen’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Emotionally, too, this passage provides a precursor for the way that Bach-like chorales fulfil a superego-like function in Rihm’s Jakob Lenz. Indeed, Rihm has commented that he had wanted to study with Zimmermann, but was prevented from doing so by the latter’s early death.58 Zimmermann’s collage technique is grounded in his idiosyncratic notion of the sphericality of time, stemming from a philosophical tradition which draws a distinction between chronological and experienced time. According to Zimmermann’s understanding, past, present and future are a matter of perspective in the continuum of time. He wrote: One cannot avoid observing that we live in harmony with a huge diversity of culture from the most varied periods; that we exist simultaneously on many different levels of time and experience, most of which are neither connected

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with one another, nor do they appear to derive from each other. And yet, let’s be quite honest – we feel at home in this network of countless tangled threads.59

An example of the composer’s multidimensional collage approach can be found in the last movement of his Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu (1966), which superimposes the Dies irae from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, the opening repeated chord from Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX and music from the prelude to Act III of Wagner’s Die Walküre.60 The ideas of simultaneity and collage became extended by multimedia techniques in Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. Composed between 1967 and 1969, this score was dedicated to Saint Hermanni-Josephi, who is buried in the cloister at Steinfeld where the composer attended school, and was commissioned by the Cologne radio station. It is scored for the large forces associated with the nineteenth-century requiem – specifically, orchestra, organ, three choirs, soprano and bass soloists – to which the composer added speakers, jazz quintet and four tapes. Zimmermann chose to call this hybrid a ‘Lingual’, meaning language piece, as a way of describing a form that combines literary material with aspects of the ‘radio play, the documentary, journalistic reporting and musical forms such as the cantata and oratorio’;61 to this list he might have added another staple of the 1960s – the happening.62 Of course, the dedication and the whole requiem framework also ensure that there is also a liturgical context to this diffuse score. The time frame of Requiem für einen jungen Dichter is roughly that of Zimmermann’s life, covering the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Second World War, the crushing of protests in Prague in 1968 and the social unrest in western Europe during the same year. Zimmermann explained that the work refers not to a particular person, ‘but to the young poet in a general sense as we can imagine him for the period of the last fifty years, in the various relationships contained in his spiritual, cultural, historical and linguistic situation’.63 That said, Vladmir Mayakovsky, the futurist poet who lived through the Bolshevik revolution before taking his own life in 1930, features prominently in the work, which at one stage in its genesis was to have been a Mayakovsky Cantata.64 The large quantity of spoken materials divides into quotations from literary sources, some of which are performed live and some of which appear on tape, and recordings of historical speeches. In contrast to the focus on phonetics found in a score such as Ligeti’s Aventures, Zimmermann ensured that individual words remained intact,65 although it does not follow that meanings are retained in the wash of sounds and

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languages, which include German, English and Russian. Like the linguistic material, the musical range in the score is huge: the live element includes Zimmermann’s own orchestral and choral writing, which is often cluster based, and the improvising jazz quintet; the recorded aspect extends to the Beatles and to a range of quotations from the classical canon. Not surprisingly, the multimedia dimension of the piece affects the layout of the score: many of the pages are divided in half between notated manuscript and graphics, and the latter apply not only to the tape parts but also to some of the instrumental writing. The multitude of information in the score is conveyed in performance by specifications for performers and loudspeakers to surround the audience on four sides. The work is divided into four parts: Prolog, Requiem I, Requiem II and Donna nobis pacem. Conceived late in the compositional process, the Prolog features deep, dense sonorities that are worthy of Ligeti’s Atmosphères, combining tape with low orchestral and choral writing. The most prominent and comprehensible quotation in the Prolog is from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and it serves to introduce a central theme in the whole score (although this source appeared late in the planning process): the ways in which language is used to represent ourselves and our worlds. A substantial segment of Molly Bloom’s monologue from Joyce’s Ulysses is also present, although it is less clear, as an embodiment of the stream of consciousness technique that is so important for this score. (In a letter from as far back as 1956 concerning text sources, the author wrote of wanting to adapt musically James Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique.)66 Alexander Dubček’s speech to the Czechoslovakian people from August 1968 is part of the mix as well, providing the crucial historical context.67 Requiem I is dominated by tape and offers a substantial increase in quotations, creating a vast montage of sound. One combination, which Zimmermann labelled ‘Comp. II’, presents simultaneously Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’, words from Finnegans Wake, the noise of mass demonstrations and the sound of surf. Moreover, it overlaps with another amalgamation, ‘Comp. III’, in which Messiaen’s L’Ascension (for organ) is heard amidst the noises of jet fighters and artillery strikes. This profusion of sound continues into Requiem II, in which we hear ‘Hey Jude’ (a Beatles hit from 1968), the improvising jazz quintet, and some poetry by Mayakovsky. However, the section entitled ‘Rappresentazione’ marks a significant change of texture: at this point, full orchestra, choir and soloists become the forces that carry the literary material instead of tape montages. Accordingly, the layout of the written score becomes more conventional and this scoring prevails through the remaining sub-sections of Requiem II; it would seem this transition marked an important moment for the composer since the heading ‘Requiem

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für einen jungen Dichter’ appears on its first page. The final Donna nobis pacem starts by combining tapes of Stalin, Goebbels and Churchill with the orchestra, placing them alongside ‘Hey Jude’ and the beginning of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, before allowing the choirs to emerge in the liturgical setting. Shortly before the end, the noises of various demonstrations, in for example Paris and Prague, reconfirm the 1968 context. In Requiem, Zimmermann expanded his approach to pluralism by mixing speech and music and by using electronic resources, creating a score in which an expressionist link to Berg exists alongside multimedia ambitions on a scale to match any avant-garde score from the time, even the almost exactly contemporary Sinfonia by Berio, which is best known for its innovative use of the Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony as a vehicle for the musical flow in the middle movement. If the political chaos of Requiem does not coalesce into a single message, the presence of this social dimension is sufficient to locate the work far from the transcendentalism of Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen, another key score from 1968. Furthermore, its use of tape as a semantic and sonic resource is very different from Stockhausen’s concern in Gesang der Jünglinge (1956) with the structural blending of electronic and vocal sounds. Looking forward, Zimmermann’s use of broadcasts may well at some level have influenced Lachenmann’s deployment of radios in his Kontrakadenz. Requiem für einen jungen Dichter depicts in uncompromising terms the sheer incongruity between poetic ideals and the turbulence of the twentieth century. Despite this gloomy diagnosis, its multimedia techniques point to the future, and Zimmermann’s sense of the present as a critical perspective on the past is of relevance for much of the music considered in this book. What is striking about Zimmermann’s amalgamations is that they amount to more than text about text or music about music, because they unsettle established semantic associations. No other score expresses the politically and culturally confused potential of 1968 as directly as Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. Born in 1927, Wilhelm Killmayer is of the generation that became dominant in the 1950s, although he pursued a different trajectory to his better-known contemporaries. In the first phase of his career, he exhibited the influence of his teacher Carl Orff, writing predominantly vocal music in which ostinato patterns are prevalent, in keeping with a wish to communicate directly. Unlike many of the composers in this book, he was not directly influenced by the social upheaval of 1968, but he did recognize, perhaps in deference to Zimmermann, that the collage techniques of the 1960s enabled the present to be influenced by rehearing the past.68 Certainly, rehearing the German Romantics and responding to existing music hermeneutically

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became central to his compositional identity at about the same time as a new generation of composers, such as Manfred Trojahn and Rihm, were exploring similar tendencies. Paradoxically, Killmayer associates himself not with tradition as such but with the tradition of the outsider. Nevertheless, such a stance obviously needs something of which to be outside, and in Killmayer’s case that something is the post-war avant-garde and its fixation with material, which means that he is partly defined by being different from Stockhausen. Less obviously, he is also defined by reflection on a specifically German tradition. As mentioned, Schumann was a central figure in the re-engagement with the past that took place in the 1970s and beyond, a development that Killmayer anticipated in his Schumann in Endenich – Kammermusik no. 2, for piano and five percussionists (1972). Unlike later examples, though, the connection with Schumann is established in this case more by the accompanying note, which links the piece to Schumann’s residence in a mental sanatorium near Bonn, than by direct allusions. It reads: At the age of 44 Schumann voluntarily entered an asylum at Endenich, participating no further with the life-struggle. This child-like man had increasingly become a ‘strange man’ to his fellows, who claimed to be grown-up, ‘big’. This was a cause of his sufferings. For him, the piano keyboard was the entrance to a world in which he could flee and confide.69

This remark invites a hermeneutic approach to the score, whereby the simple melodic shapes in the piano (and their extension in the marimba) represent Schumann, or a more general notion of subjectivity clinging to the signifying mechanisms of a former self, while the extensive percussion, which is reminiscent of Varèse, conveys the outside world of obligations, which are experienced as pulses and shocks. This interpretation is supported from the very opening of the piece: a high, single-line piano melody that circles around E in semitone steps is marked ‘mit Empfindung’ (‘with feeling’), indicating that this limited motion carries an expressive trace. As the score progresses, this emotional residue in the piano writing is subjected to pulsive percussion textures, and in the final passage this instrument changes from one state to the other (as indicated by the marking ‘mit zunehmender innerer Spannung’ – ‘with increasing inner tension’), turning sustained semitone rocking into obsessively repeated chords that are heard alongside the noise of snare drum rolls. It is reasonable, then, to interpret the last page of this score (an excerpt from which is shown in Ex. 2.3) as a direct embodiment of psychosis, whereby the motor rhythms and shapes of familiarity collapse into compulsive noise.

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Ex. 2.3 Wilhelm Killmayer, Schumann in Endenich, bars 106–12

The simple melodic figures may well relate to the idea of childhood, which is a prevalent topic for Schumann and Killmayer, and one that is further conveyed by the hand movements associated with basic keyboard patterns. This linkage is also to be found in Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel, as Jörn Peter Hiekel has noted, where semitone motion traverses the whole keyboard in the first piece. Hiekel argues too that Killmayer’s interest in late Schumann anticipates a scholarly and compositional trend that ran in parallel with the increasing attention paid to late Hölderlin, whom Killmayer also set.70 Schumann certainly continued to exert an influence on Killmayer, as heard in his Heine-Lieder (1995), which set nine poems already used by Schumann. Killmayer is more of a fellow traveller with Rihm in the 1970s than the initiator of a trend that was followed by the younger composer. Nevertheless, Rihm would have known Schumann in Endenich, and late style and madness are themes that are regularly explored in his music from the 1970s. Of course, these ideas occur with direct reference to Schumann in

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his Fremde Szenen, which concern themselves with the evocation of strangeness. In 1982, the year in which he started the Fremde Szenen pieces, Rihm commented of Killmayer: ‘anyone who finds this music strange is on the right track. The “strange” is of Schumann’s type (Fremder Mann . . . )’.71 In the same essay, furthermore, Rihm talks of hidden signs (actually the title of the score by Killmayer, Verschüttete Zeichen, 1978) in terms very similar to those he uses in connection with the word ‘Chiffre’; and it is not hard to find parallels between Schumann in Endenich and the solo piano and percussion textures of his Chiffre series (which he began in 1982). The flow was not one way, however, because Killmayer published a detailed study of Rihm’s Klavierstück Nr. 6.72 Killmayer writes of his Nachtgedanken for orchestra (Night Thoughts): ‘Under the bell of night, time passes, which we can no longer measure by any light, only by the memory of the passage of time during the day.’ Furthermore, he considers that during the night ‘our inner tone intensifies and becomes audible’ and adds: ‘Our thoughts are no longer detached from us: they breathe.’73 Most of this score offers a rich, continuous melodic flow that readily recalls nineteenth-century practice, and with the textures thickening and swelling towards the middle of the piece, it appears to follow a conventional arch form. However, the latter expectation is dashed by the eruption of an agitated (nightmarish) string texture at the end that is determined more by mood association than by development of a motivic idea; this feverish texture is based on the F to E semitone descent that features in the opening line of Schumann in Endenich, suggesting that the pattern is a signifier of inwardness for Killmayer. The other aspect in this piece that unsettles expectations is the presence until the last bar of an amplified pulse on the marimba, which continues irrespective of what else is happening in the orchestra. Understood in terms of the composer’s programme note, this throbbing presence might represent our inner tone or it might signify the regular passing of time in contrast to more reflective memory; it certainly thwarts a sense of security. In Nachtgedanken, Killmayer evokes a Romantic tradition, one that reaches its apex in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which the inward emotion of the night is more powerful than the outward rationality of the day, but he does not do so in a predictable manner. Reiner Bredemeyer (1929–95) studied in Munich from 1949 and moved to East Berlin in 1954, influenced by his admiration for Paul Dessau who had returned to Germany after the war. As well as composing concert pieces, he wrote music for the stage, television, film and radio. The score for which he is best known is Bagatellen für B. for piano and orchestra, which, like Kagel’s Ludwig van film, was composed for the Beethoven

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bicentenary in 1970. If Bredemeyer does not attack Beethoven as an institution on quite the scale undertaken by Kagel, his piece is nonetheless critical: it contrasts the heroic style of the Third Symphony, which Elaine Kelly observes ‘was a linchpin of the socialist canon’,74 with the laconic articulations of two later Bagatelles – Op. 119 No. 3 and Op. 126 No. 2 (which is very much in the late style). The work opens with the two introductory chords of the Eroica, representative of the expansive gestures of a middle-period symphony, followed by fragments from the more concise Op. 119 Bagatelle; this process is then repeated with the Op. 126 Bagatelle taking the place of its predecessor. This montage sets the scene for juxtapositions and superimpositions in the rest of this short piece, the Eroica shreds characterized more by transitions, sforzando chords and cadences than by recognizable melodic material. These gestures, which have been detached from the structure they once articulated, now cut across the two piano pieces in which there is already a heightened awareness of syntactical procedures. Towards the end, the opening theme of the Op. 126 Bagatelle is used to accompany the initial motif of the Op. 119 Bagatelle. The later piece is then subjected to registral distortion and becomes sutured to the vamping second theme of its predecessor. The score ends with the whole orchestra playing unspecified Beethovenian rhythms on the pitch B♭ (B in German). Both the Bagatelles alternate between broken semiquaver figures and more lyrical motion, with little by way of transition between the gestures. Adorno commented on the discontinuity in the later piece and more generally found in the Op. 126 set a ‘tendency towards the inorganic’ that is quintessentially late style.75 Interestingly, Bredemeyer stated that Bagatellen für B. concurs with Adorno’s understanding of Beethoven’s late style;76 he referred to Adorno’s ‘reading of this clear, simple language’ and quoted from the essay ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’ the phrase ‘like the distressed prelude to an aria’ that Adorno applied to the introductory and closing bars of the last of the Op. 126 set.77 In the same essay, he would have read the more general statement about late works: ‘They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art, showing more traces of history than of growth.’78 In taking on these perspectives, therefore, Bredemeyer used the scrutiny of unifying gestures found in late Beethoven to critique a reception practice rooted in the heroic style. It is a socialist version of that classicist aesthetic to which Bredemeyer responds, with his buckled quotations taking a general frustration with Beethoven as a cultural authority beyond Adorno’s interpretation, not least in the humorous aspect of the collage that meets many of the standard criteria of postmodernism. Like Kagel’s Ludwig van projects,

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Bagatellen für B. offers a view of Beethoven by speaking through him. In the context of the German Democratic Republic, though, the montage techniques may well have been intended to comment ironically on a theory of heritage (Erbetheorie) which, Utz Riese argues, claimed to be rooted in ‘historical truth, plenitude and emancipation’ but was used instrumentally to justify the stasis of the present.79 Like many composers in West Germany, Bredemeyer turned to poets set by Schubert and Schumann, namely Müller and Heine; notably, he drew on the Müller collection also used by Schubert: Die Winterreise: Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (Poems from the Surviving Papers of a Travelling Horn Player). Bredemeyer’s cycle only shares some poems with Schubert’s version and it departs from its illustrious predecessor by involving the eponymous horn. Like its well-known precedent, Bredemeyer’s ‘Der Leiermann’ includes a static drone in the piano, over which the exchanges between the voice and horn carry the subdued residue of bucolic forest associations. Clearly, therefore, the idea of the hurdy-gurdy man as an archetypal outsider is one that can be adapted to many circumstances. In Kagel’s Aus Deutschland, this image sets the stage for representing characters from songs as dramatic figures, and perhaps symbolizes the composer’s external perspective on the lied tradition. For Bredemeyer, though, this alienated figure represented not an opportunity to unravel conventions but a more personal embodiment of the social situation he faced.

Henze Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) represented the alternative path to Stockhausen: he became part of the established concert scene before turning political in the 1960s; Stockhausen, by contrast, rejected conventional musical practices, and then turned spiritual in the 1960s. Henze attended the early, stylistically diverse years of the Darmstadt summer courses, which started in 1946, before figures such as Stockhausen, Boulez and Nono became associated with the institution, and before the gradual influence of serialism consolidated a specific reception of Webern. In Henze’s view, ‘the technocratic conception of art, dodecaphony’s mechanistic heresy’, what he also called a ‘glass-bead-game’, became the official doctrine at Darmstadt from the early 1950s. He associated this shift with the arrival of Stockhausen in 1951, whose advocacy of his own approach turned composers into ‘competitors in the same market’.80 In addition, Henze spoke of Boulez’s dismissal of anything that was not Webernian at the 1955 course, feeling that Webern was being appropriated in a mechanistic way that amounted to a misinterpretation of his aesthetics.81 Henze was also possibly the only member of his generation

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who admired the neo-classical scores of Stravinsky, the influence of which is evident in his early symphonies and operas. Unlike Kagel, who chose to live in Germany because it was a centre for new music, Henze was born there but opted to be resident in Italy from 1953, a move that was prompted largely by a wish to establish a nonGermanic identity in a warmer climate, but which also had the desired effect of removing him from avant-gardist circles. As Henze related it, ‘in Italy I built up a world of my own, around myself and my work, out of my ideas, my wishes and dreams’. Nevertheless, this situation was not without its disadvantages, as Henze also noted. He continued, ‘I did not notice that I was obviously isolating myself, that my music was becoming more and more private’.82 Having become aware of this drawback while writing the opera The Bassarids (1966), in 1967 he travelled to Berlin to meet Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the student movement – who subsequently spent several months convalescing at Henze’s home after the famous assassination attempt. From that point on, like Nono, Henze became a politically committed composer. Nevertheless, he did so in a non-avant-gardist way because his concern was to express political themes, not to attack institutions by moving away from established, bourgeois compositional devices. The oratorio Das Floss der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa, 1968) became something of a centrepiece for Henze’s political convictions, less for its message than for the riot that ensued at what was to have been its premiere on December 1968 in Hamburg. Like Théodore Géricault’s painting concerned with the same subject, Henze’s oratorio is about the men, women and children who were abandoned to their fate on a makeshift raft after the shipwreck of the frigate Medusa, and it dramatizes the tragedy by instructing singers to move from the choir of the living to the choir of the dead as the music unfolds. The aspect of the score that triggered problems, however, was its dedication to Che Guevara, who was killed in 1967. According to Henze’s accounts of the attempted premiere, some students had placed a poster of Che Guevara on the podium which had been torn up by the director of Hamburg Radio, at which point the students had replaced it with a red flag.83 As Henze was waiting off-stage with the soloists (including the baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) to conduct the performance, he was approached by a legal representative from the radio station, who asked him to take down the flag; Henze refused and proceeded to the platform with the soloists. As he raised his baton to commence, however, he became aware that the chamber choir brought from Berlin was demanding removal of the flag, at which point conductor, soloists and chamber choir left the stage. Off-stage, the chorus informed Henze that they were not prepared to

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perform under the flag that flew over Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, thereby representing the German Democratic Republic. Meanwhile, riot police had entered the auditorium and were busy arresting members of the audience considered to be troublesome. In the commotion, Ernst Schnabel (the librettist of Das Floss der Medusa and one-time controller of North German Radio) was injured and arrested. Prior to the concert, Henze had been attacked in the magazine Der Spiegel on the grounds that it was inconsistent for a member of the Establishment to claim to be speaking for the new left. Equally, some on the left disliked his associations with the Establishment, considering him to be a champagne socialist. Despite being hurt by the events surrounding Das Floss der Medusa, Henze went on to write further scores that endeavoured to articulate social injustices. One of these was Voices for mezzo-soprano, tenor and chamber orchestra (1973), a setting in a range of styles of twenty-two poems by various authors in an assortment of languages, which share an underlying theme of oppression. Another was El Cimarrón: Recital for Four Musicians (1970), which as well as telling the story of the one-time slave Esteban Montejo, is a portrait of Cuba drawing on Afro-Cuban rhythms. Since Henze rejected the notion of advanced material and considered himself to be part of the European musical tradition, he did not have to re-engage with this heritage after following avant-garde pursuits; but he did have to re-engage with the Austro-German tradition that was so problematic for him. One of the ways in which he distanced himself from a particular reading of Webern was by turning to Mahler, who also became a focal point for younger composers pursuing an alternative to the constructivist values of the 1950s, with references to the Fifth Symphony appearing in the Rimbaud setting Being Beauteous (1963) and the opera The Bassarids (1966).84 Nevertheless, one thing he did share with the avantgardists of his generation was an aversion to Wagner, who represented the Romantic legacy they were trying to eradicate. In relation to The Bassarids Henze commented: ‘I simply cannot abide this silly and self-regarding emotionalism, behind which it is impossible not to detect a neo-German mentality and ideology.’85 Henze’s eventual turn to Wagner served simultaneously, therefore, to acknowledge the German tradition and to align him neatly with the emergence of neo-Romanticism in Germany during the 1970s. In his Tristan: Preludes for Piano, Electronic Tapes and Orchestra (1973) he assembled the tapes first and then adapted the orchestra to them, mainly because it was easier for him to manipulate an orchestra than a tape. Nevertheless, the sequence of events suggests as well that Henze wanted as a first step to defamiliarize Wagner.

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A somewhat heterogeneous score, Tristan is in six sections that Henze called ‘Preludes’, possibly as a way of referring, on the one hand, to the preludes to Acts I and III of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and, on the other, to the preludes of Chopin. Henze’s work quotes directly from Wagner’s score and includes a number of piano interludes (he called them monologues) with a Chopinesque feel, though it alludes more conspicuously to this composer’s well-known Funeral March from the Second Piano Sonata. The first two movements evoke Wagner’s Act I prelude by adopting the key of A minor that is famously an understated presence in Wagner’s original. More specifically, Henze wrote of his first prelude that the thematic material – ‘semitonal steps and sixths, chords of fourths and, in particular, diminished fifths – distantly recalls the music of Wagner’s Tristan’, though noting that his music offsets the incandescent qualities of Wagner’s music with ‘a marmoreal sound and depersonalized quality’.86 In the third section, ‘Preludes and Variations’, ruminations on Wagner are interrupted by an ‘unexpected visitation’ from the opening of Brahms’s First Symphony. Henze commented: I had intimated that it stands for the enemy. What its precise meaning is should be left open; it is sufficient to know that it does not signify only the pedantic opponent of Wagner, familiar from biographies, nor merely, in the grey North Sea light of the sounds, the dreary day that Tristan dreads and hates.

He also wrote of ‘this theatrical entrance of the Enemy, of this wrenching open of a door’,87 a description that serves to associate Brahms with King Marke, since he signifies daylight and reason in Wagner’s opera, standing for the symbolic duties, the expectations and the class system that forbid Tristan and Isolde’s passion. The effect, therefore, is to convey the past represented by Wagner’s prelude as a resource, but to link the past constituted by the classicizing Brahms with the dreariness of northern Europe, and to invoke it as a threatening (possibly supernatural) presence. The outcome is immediate because in the next prelude, ‘Tristan’s Folly’, Tristan’s madness erupts in surging textures and soaring string lines that are redolent of Rihm’s Dis-Kontur (which appeared the following year), and that are closer to Wagnerian expression than to the marmoreal. Once more, there is a visitation from Brahms which leads this time to a ‘clattering, groaning, howling, roaring’ version of Chopin’s Funeral March, achieved by means of a pianola mechanism and tape distortions.88 Such is the level of disfigurement that the allusion is most apparent from the tread of dotted rhythms in the wind, with the result that the march’s authority as a symbol of death is obliterated.89

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The response to this moment from the fifth prelude is a series of neoclassical dances that the composer called a ‘grimace’, perhaps in a comment on his own neo-classicist tendencies. These lead to a largo section that is devoted to what Henze described as ‘a scream of death no longer simply that of Isolde or Tristan, but of the whole suffering world, which seems to burst the bounds of concert music. What can be heard on tape is an electronic elaboration of the scream of a Wagnerian heroine, broken up into many voices and colours.’90 The orchestra, for its part, offers a grinding semitonal descent, with bird-calls, a flexatone and foghorn all adding to the outpouring. Lawrence Kramer remarks of this moment: ‘Henze reduces the voice to dead matter, much as Anselm Kiefer . . . reduces Brünnhilde’s warhorse, Grane, to a skeleton exposed as by an X-ray by the flames of a general immolation.’91 The comparison with Keifer, a number of whose artworks have specifically Wagnerian themes, is valid, although it is also important to recognize the significance of texture for this artist. One of his most enduring and recurring images is of burned fields, sometimes sewn with (real) barbed wire, which are representational to the extent that they look something like burned fields. But they are also evocative in the more direct sense that their massive textures, containing actual furrows, embody what they convey to the extent that ash is even used in the mix. Thus these constructions signify not primarily by what they look like but by what they are. Henze’s enactment of the shuddering corporality of a scream is closer to the medium of these objects than to their representational qualities. It is thoroughly modernist, therefore, and even approaches the timbral ingenuity of Lachenmann. The epilogue is in three parts: the first is scored for solo piano, the second includes a direct quotation from Wagner’s prelude to Act III, and the third comprises music for orchestra and tape based on material from the Act III prelude. The second of these components starts with a recorded heartbeat, leading to the desolate music opening the Act III prelude; over both of these a child’s voice reads in English from the twelfth-century Tristan by Thomas d’Angleterre (Ex. 2.4): ‘She takes him into her arms and then, lying out full length, she kisses his face and lips and clasps him tightly to her. Then straining body to body, she at once gives up her spirit and of sorrow for her lover dies thus at his side.’92 What Henze has done, therefore, is to attempt to salvage Isolde’s transfiguration by returning it to its medieval source, by conveying it through a child’s voice, and by replacing its music with the less ideologically freighted depiction of loneliness from the prelude. This recasting places the scene’s emotions on a less intoxicated, more human scale, but at the same time harnesses them to the intensity of the prelude; what this scaling down loses though is the erotic charge of

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Ex. 2.4 Hans Werner Henze, Tristan, bars 1–7 from the second part of the epilogue

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Wagner’s original. In the third part of the epilogue, this same music is heard in electronic transformation through an orchestral haze of what Henze considered to be Venetian bells. For him, this light and these sounds remember ‘the deaths and varieties of deaths, and the dead whose passing has impoverished mankind, while the fascists’ goose-step resounds through buildings deserted by the people’.93 The previous remark indicates that the historical reflection of Henze’s Tristan does not represent a turn away from political music (which is very much evident in the subsequent music-theatre work We Come to the River, 1976), but the score does provide a different focus for that concern. Between the completion of preludes 5 and 6, Henze was shaken by events personal and political: his friends W. H. Auden and Ingeborg Bachmann had died, and on a political level Chile became subject to the dictatorship of Pinochet. These are the experiences that Henze tried to transfigure with his epilogue, with a view to reclaiming Tristan und Isolde as a voice for the dead and oppressed. For Henze, therefore, the process was one of engaging not only with the past, but also with his own German identity. Stephen Downes notes that Henze’s Seventh Symphony (1984) is an important successor to his Tristan because it is ‘identified as the symphony in which Henze turns to overt and sustained engagement with the AustroGerman late-Romantic symphonic tradition, by contrast with the more or less defiant eschewal of this tradition in his earlier symphonies’.94 Moreover, by setting a text by Hölderlin, it participated in a larger trend at this time. Oliver Knussen has indicated that Tristan’s ‘surrealistic juxtapositions, shifts and references point forward to the world of the Requiem’, a substantial, voiceless work in nine movements scored for piano, trumpet and orchestra dating from 1992.95 And Henze himself proposed another link between the two scores by means of ‘a new and freer approach to chromaticism that sometimes suggests a return to the harmonic world of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I use this harmonic language much as a poet integrates a particular foreign idiom into his personal style for his own specific ends.’96 For Whittall, though, Henze’s dialogue with Wagner extends beyond drawing on chromaticism for particular needs to a more fundamental exploration of his aversion and attraction to the Dionysian qualities of this composer.97 Thus Henze’s responses to Wagner were indicative of a side of his creative temperament that resisted his stated aim of creating ‘works of classical beauty’.98 Although he had little contact with the new music scene in Germany, Henze’s use of existing expressive devices attracted the attention of Lachenmann who engaged him in a heated exchange that took place in several stages. The first part was a highly charged public discussion in Stuttgart

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(1982), in which Lachenmann’s main point was that worn-out musical and expressive conventions cannot be deployed without reflection.99 Henze’s response was: ‘I use such signs, that can be retrieved (as you say), in order to address, or retrieve, certain things with the listener; to make the listeners attentive to certain things.’100 In the second leg, Henze reported the event in his book Die englische Katze: Ein Arbeitstagbuch 1978–1982, commenting, in inflammatory terms, on Lachenmann’s rudeness, and describing him as a representative of what he called ‘musica negativa’. In the third stage, Lachenmann published a letter in the Neue Musikzeitung (1983) which responded to Henze’s account of proceedings by referring to a recording of the original exchange, in order to refute the charge of rudeness, while also taking issue with the term ‘musica negativa’. The most significant part of Lachenmann’s reply is that it deemed Henze to be a ‘confirmed believer’ in the younger generation.101 Accordingly, it includes material that was extracted from his article ‘Affekt und Aspekt’ (‘affect’ being used here to refer to expressive devices and ‘aspect’ to material procedures), in which the neo-Romantics are described in vitriolic terms. Even though Lachenmann does not actually place Henze in the same group as this younger generation, he extends the same criticism to both parties: ‘Convention and pleasure as one: the petit bourgeois are unmasked.’102 Notwithstanding the personal animosity that informed this dispute, the issue at stake was substantial: whether or not the expressive norms of bourgeois music had become an obsolete currency. Solutions to this conundrum would seem to be very much dependent on the ways in which those norms are negotiated in specific compositional contexts. Neither Henze’s nor Lachenmann’s approach is intrinsically likely to produce better results. Henze was right to assert that existing meanings can be reworked (though he did not envisage the semiotic recoding deployed by Rihm), but Lachenmann is also correct to claim that a refusal of these meanings can access hitherto unenvisaged domains of expressivity. What the tone of the exchanges obscured was that both composers were perceived to be figures of the left, who had been influenced by the student unrest in 1968 and who were both trying to find a musical outlet for this new politics. Nevertheless, this dimension is implied by the way that each figure lays claim to shared ground with Nono: Lachenmann as a student of the latter, considers that his own challenge to bourgeois music aesthetics is in keeping with the radicalism of his teacher; and Henze for his part felt he shared political allegiances with a fellow resident of Italy. Henze was less closely allied with the younger generation than Lachenmann suggested in the dispute, because its representatives rejected political music and were not sympathetic to his brand of neo-classicism. They preferred to find common cause with Killmayer’s alternative to serialism, possibly

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because it engaged more obviously with German traditions than was the case with Henze’s more cosmopolitan approach. Discussing Henze in 1979, Rihm confirms that he shares the senior figure’s belief in communication, but he chooses to position himself strategically as somewhere between Henze and Stockhausen, and even suggests that a stage had been reached where the two lines could be brought together.103 What enables him to situate himself between Henze’s traditionalism and Stockhausen’s avant-gardism was a developed understanding of musical hermeneutics and a recognition that avant-gardism had itself become a tradition.

Stockhausen Along with Boulez and Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) was one of the key figures of the early years of the Darmstadt summer courses, was perhaps the leading innovator of serial and electronic music in the 1950s, and quickly became the most powerful young composer in Germany. Gruppen for three orchestras (1957) is a landmark of serial ambition in its spatial use of sound, and it is one of the key influences on Lachenmann’s notion of timbral music. Moving into the 1960s, Momente for soprano, four choral groups and thirteen instrumentalists (1964) stands out not just for its serially derived substantiation of moment-form, but for the way it uses properties such as timbre and mode of production to articulate moments. Stockhausen was working on the revised version of this score at the time Rihm was studying with him (1972), and the idea of moments became very important to the junior composer, who attended rehearsals of the new version. In a speech that was given on the occasion of Stockhausen receiving the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1986, Rihm quickly identifies Momente and Mantra as key works, and he readily connects them to the past in a manner that offers insight into the way as a composer he was able to relate Stockhausen’s innovations to wider influences. Specifically, he associates Momente with Schoenberg’s thinking in moments in the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, but argues that it was Stockhausen’s discovery that a moment is strong enough to stand independently in time.104 Hymnen for tape and soloists (1967) reflects a time in which the Vietnam War loomed large, and its theme of world unification through national anthems offers a response very different to Nono’s explicitly political stance at that stage. The work’s combination of idealism and technical advancement creates a tension between, on the one hand, synthesizing and morphing propensities, and on the other, a more diffuse tendency to sound like a pluralist collage. In addition, the presence of the anthems has the indirect consequence of reintroducing tonal melodies. Tonal material also occurs in

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Stimmung for six vocalists (1967) since it is based on a ninth chord, although this is not the main point of a piece which is more obviously about timbral inflections that are designed to induce a meditative state. Stockhausen’s presence on the album cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper (1967) indicated that his international profile during the era extended well beyond new music circles. His most direct response to the ferment of the late 1960s took the form of what he called ‘intuitive music’, an idea that related to the interest in oriental philosophy of the time, and one that had more in common with the hippy tendency than with the political mood. It was also one that aimed to challenge the perceptions of freedom associated with improvisation by arguing that such practices are dependent on learned patterns. Free jazz provided a contemporary example of one such practice – and one that irked Stockhausen because Michel Portal, the clarinettist in his ensemble, tended to lapse into such patterns when performances became heated.105 Stockhausen also sought to distinguish between his concept of intuitive music and the text-compositions of American experimental composers such as La Monte Young, which provided instructions designed to enhance perception of the surrounding acoustic environment. Stockhausen’s directions, by contrast, tried to engender a state of consciousness as a way of connecting with a more encompassing spirituality. The concept of intuitive music was expressed most directly in the textcompositions that constitute Aus den sieben Tagen, composed in May 1968 as the cover of the score proudly declares. The title refers to the seven days Stockhausen spent meditating, fasting and reading the ideas of Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo, at a time of personal crisis, during which these pieces were devised. (It is conceivable that this experience was also formative for the seven-day scheme of the Licht cycle.) Aus den sieben Tagen comprises fifteen text-compositions, mainly for unspecified ensemble. Their spiritual dimension is clearly illustrated by the content of ‘Night Music’: Play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe play a vibration in the rhythm of dreaming play a vibration in the rhythm of dreaming and slowly transform it into the rhythm of the universe repeat this as often as you can

Such open-ended instructions undoubtedly present performers with the challenge of agreeing on what, for instance, the rhythm of the universe might be! ‘Litany’ is perhaps the most prescient of the collection of directions because it offers a view of creative activity from which the composer never wavered: ‘I do not make MY music, but only relay the vibrations I receive; that

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I function like a translator, that I am a radio.’106 On the one hand, there is a mystical dimension to such a view that might be conceived to be a turn away from the technical orientation of the 1950s; on the other hand, the statement lends a metaphysical authority to the composer’s decisions. Stockhausen devoted his composition seminar at the 1969 Darmstadt course to performances of pieces from Aus den sieben Tagen, a decision that increased the sense of unease concerning his prominence at the institution. According to Toop, composers interested in writing politically engaged music who had been able to take ideas from Stockhausen at an earlier stage found that these texts ‘were totally resistant to Marxist interpretations and assimilations’.107 In keeping with this view, Lachenmann writes of this year: ‘the composer as stipulator was becoming . . . a regulator, perhaps even a manipulator’.108 His point is that, far from being about a loss of self or about allowing performers to follow intuitions, these pieces enabled Stockhausen to exert control over performers, just as he exerted control over the courses. (Lachenmann’s own Air, which was premiered at Darmstadt that year too, offers a very different response to the restrictions of structuralist composition.) Lachenmann’s remark about the relationship between performers and composer was not unfounded. Stockhausen himself related with good humour the problems the pianist Aloys Kontarsky experienced with the instruction ‘play a vibration in the rhythm of the universe’, until the composer exemplified his intention in relation to Webern.109 More damagingly, the same pieces also led to a major dispute with the experienced composer-improviser trombonist Vinko Globokar, who disliked the control exerted by the composer from the mixing desk, challenged the idea that it was a single-author work, and refused to have his name associated with the recording.110 Beyond interpersonal dynamics, the different responses from Kontarsky and Globokar to these text-pieces indicated divergences of opinion on the balance to be struck between the performer as executor and the performer as creative agent. By a historical quirk, the Beethoven bicentenary coincided with the social turmoil of the late 1960s, as already indicated in the earlier discussions of Kagel and Bredemeyer. Stockhausen marked the event with Kurzwellen mit Beethoven – Opus 1970, which, taking Kurzwellen (1969) as a basis, uses four tape recorders as substitutes for the short-wave radio receivers. The tapes contain montages of Beethoven interspersed with passages from the Heiligenstadt Testament; they play continually, and are modified electronically to sound like short-wave receivers being tuned in. Stockhausen’s simulation of interrupted Beethoven broadcasts undoubtedly disturbs a certain institutional representation of the composer, but it does

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not unpick conventions with the precision of Kagel’s film Ludwig van. There is a precedent for its use of recorded media in Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter and a parallel in Lachenmann’s later Kontrakadenz; indeed, the idea of fading-in and fadingout may also have influenced the tape part in the latter’s Accanto (1976). Like Hymnen, Kurzwellen mit Beethoven also revealed Stockhausen to be indirectly engaging with tonal material. This trend was to continue in the 1980s, when he wrote cadenzas for the Haydn trumpet concerto and the Mozart concertos for clarinet and flute, and subsequently conducted performances of these scores using the group of soloists he had assembled for the Licht project. After his transitional experiments of the late 1960s, Stockhausen made a technical breakthrough in Mantra for two pianists, with woodblocks and ‘cymbales antiques’ (crotales), and electronics (1970), in which he developed the idea of using melodic formulae that was to serve him for the rest of his career. The concept is one that enables quasi-serial principles to be combined with melodic shapes in order to make the music easier for the listener to follow. The principal tones of Mantra’s formula make up distinctive gestures that are divided into four groups by rests in a ratio of 3:2:1. These shapes can be expanded harmonically, melodically and rhythmically in a manner that is not so far removed from the techniques deployed by Schoenberg in his Op. 11 piano pieces – indeed Robin Maconie notes similarities between the first statement of Stockhausen’s Mantra and the material used in the second of Schoenberg’s pieces.111 This link would seem to be confirmed by Rihm’s readiness to relate Mantra to existing methods for unfolding musical material. He comments: ‘The permanent development of a musical formula as a shape out of individual shapes is here exemplary and absolutely clear.’112 Stockhausen’s score opens with the formula expressed as four chords in piano I, before asserting it melodically in the right hand against configurations of its cells in the left hand. The title of the work indicates a continued preoccupation with a fusion of rational and spiritual concerns, since the mantra is the formula, but the term also evokes the idea of something repeated in order to gain a higher plane of consciousness. Stockhausen had learned from his experiments with intuitive music in the 1960s that improvised music needs to base itself on something memorable, and it seems likely that this insight influenced the emergence of thematic thinking in his music during the 1970s. So Stockhausen was able to use his experiences of working with recognizable shapes to expand serial principles at a time when the approach taken in the 1950s was being widely queried. As Whittall comments with regard to this new thematicism:

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‘Stockhausen, it appears, had proved as susceptible as Boulez to the reintroduction of this aspect of tradition.’113 The blend of thematic formulas and spiritual concerns was to continue in Inori (Adorations, 1974), for one or two soloists and orchestra, which, in Rudolf Frisius’s judgement, attempts not only to combine principles of construction from after 1945 with older techniques of melodic writing and motivic working, but also to convey a meaning that reaches beyond the music.114 This description is one that reveals Stockhausen to be pursuing a course that was both like and unlike the ones being followed by other composers at the time. Like them, he tried to push beyond a constructivist aesthetic in order to create music that would communicate directly, and like them he did so partly by means of historical reflection, even if he was less than fully attuned to the hermeneutic features of earlier twentieth-century music. What, however, was idiosyncratic about his approach to communication was the way he linked it to a spiritual dimension. Stockhausen did not exert an explicit influence on the neoRomantic tendency in the 1970s, since it was after all in many ways a specific rejection of his stance in the 1950s; even so, Peter Andraschke observes that there is a connection between the two paths in the sense that the formula idea facilitated the use of perceptible melodic shapes. So although younger composers did not specifically imitate Stockhausen in this regard, they were able to bring established expressive qualities to comparable figures.115 As an indication of this connection, Rihm talks admiringly of the interdependence of rhythm, tone colour and harmony in Inori;116 indeed, he was able to use the Japanese melody from this score in Dis-Kontur and in his Third Symphony. The amalgamation of formula composition and spirituality was to prove decisive for Stockhausen’s remaining output. The cosmic order invoked in Sirius (1977) for trumpet, soprano voice, bass clarinet, bass voice and electronics anticipated the personal theology of the vast Licht cycle, to which Stockhausen devoted his energies from 1977. Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche comprises an opera for each day of the week, and saw the composer exploring religious themes that had been important to him earlier in his life when he was a practising Catholic. The sequence of compositions was Donnerstag (1978–80), Samstag (1981–3), Montag (1984–8), Dienstag (1987–91), Freitag (1991–4), Mittwoch (1995–7) and Sonntag (1998–2003). Stockhausen approached this mammoth task in a modular manner by building scores from components that stand as pieces in their own right. In another practical consideration, the orchestra used in Donnerstag was replaced in later operas by synthesizers and other electronic resources, thereby making production more manageable.

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Instead of staging an unfolding drama, the operas dwell on the cosmic themes underpinning the cycle that are associated with the three central characters: Michael, who embodies dynamic action; Luzifer, who embodies idealism and world knowledge; and Eve, who embodies wisdom and a nurturing spirit. Following the model established in Mantra, each of these characters is linked to a formula built from several cells: the composer correlated the Michael-formula with falling motion, as can be seen in ‘Michaels-Gruss’ (‘Michael’s Greeting’), one of three fanfares for brass and percussion that are designed to precede performances of Donnerstag (see Ex. 2.5). The Eve-formula is distinguised by two rising patterns divided by an octave descent; and the Luzifer-formula is marked by two upward leaps followed by descents. Moreover, the three formulas combine polyphonically to create the super-formula for Licht. Dramatically, these characters can be split into several representations, with the same person being depicted, sometimes simultaneously, as a mime artist, as a singer and as an onstage instrumentalist. Since the solo instrumental parts need to be memorized, they make great demands on performers, and Stockhausen found players equal to this task by drawing increasingly on an inner circle of family and acquaintances. In Ex. 2.5 there are signs for wawa mute and partial depression of the valves. The score translates the text box as follows: ‘all tongue attacks, the inst. hardly speaks [in the open, more sound than in equivalent passages indoors!] (press the tongue against the front gums and make an extremely explosive [t] or [d]) (very high, squeaking overtones can be heard)’. Exemplifying the way Stockhausen combined independent compositions and larger-scale drama, Klavierstück XII is derived from Donnerstag (Michael’s day), and Klavierstück XIII is situated in Samstag (Luzifer’s day). Both pieces were dedicated to and performed by the composer’s daughter Majella, and they both feature a range of vocalized noises. Klavierstück XV, which constitutes the ‘Farewell’ of Dienstag, was written for Stockhausen’s son Simon, but it constitutes something of a departure from the earlier pieces in the Klavierstück series because it is scored for synthesizer. In the context of Donnerstag, Klavierstück XII forms the third part of Act I (‘Michaels Jugend’), which is entitled ‘Examen’; and as befits a music exam, the piano writing is étude-like, perhaps invoking the mechanical aspect of music education. As Jerome Kohl points out, in accordance with the perspectives of mother, father and himself, from which Michael recounts his life, ‘the Eve formula is highest for the first examination, the Lucifer formula is highest for the second, and finally the Michael formula is uppermost for the third’.117 Within the context of Samstag, Klavierstück XIII constitutes the first scene, ‘Luzifers Traum’, which is to be performed as a magic act. As part of this invocation, the pianist is

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Ex. 2.5 Stockhausen, ‘Michaels-Gruss’, top trumpet line, from Donnerstag aus Licht

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required to undertake a number of actions, such as knocking on the frame, performing buttock glissandi, firing rockets, whistling, making kissing noises and counting. The excessive counting encountered in this piece and in other music associated with Luzifer, according to Maconie, is intended to signify the character’s obsessive preoccupation with rationality.118 Stockhausen commented of ‘Luzifers Traum’: ‘The formula (whose skeleton is present in the first section) is established, and then all of its elements are increasingly compressed until non-perceptibility is attained so as to engender (through compression) stillness, coloured silence, nothingness, and emptiness.’ For the composer, these processes of compression are in keeping with Luzifer’s desire to annul banal form in favour of something more spiritual.119 Luzifer’s twitches and tics are depicted on a larger scale in ‘Luzifers Tanz’, which managed simultaneously to fulfil a commission from the University of Michigan Symphony Band and to provide the third scene of Samstag. Perhaps embellishing the convention in big band jazz whereby instrumental sections stand up and sit down, Stockhausen divided his large ensemble into ten groups and then correlated these with features such as eyes, nose and mouth so that the movements of instrumentalists create the gesticulating face of Luzifer. The left eye, for example, is allocated to the saxophone section plus one percussionist, while the two cheeks are divided across brass plus percussion. In accordance with this scheme, sections of the band move up and down and from side to side in order to convey a shifting face, with the whole ensemble eventually becoming a moving physiognomy. The result provides some relief from the generally portentous moral tone of Licht, and the music and gestures combine well together. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the world premiere of Sonntag aus Licht took place in Cologne in 2011. Mittwoch aus Licht, from which previously only components had been performed, received its first complete staged performance in Birmingham, England, in 2012. Famously, the ‘opera’ contains the ‘Helicopter Quartet’ (third scene), in which the members of a string quartet are dispersed between four helicopters, and their contributions are brought to the audience by means of an audio-visual system – along with the whirring of the helicopter blades. Although extreme in its demands, the scene is in keeping with the spatial emphasis of Mittwoch. This aspect is also evident in the ‘World Parliament’, an impressive first scene in which an elevated choir surrounds the audience and debates antiphonally the topic of love. Moreover, it is even more obvious in the following ‘Orchestra Finalists’, in which members of the ensemble fly – by means of seating attached to pulleys in the Birmingham production. The elaborate fourth

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scene, ‘Michaelion’, concludes with a statement of the Licht super-formula in a moment of synthesis between the three main protagonists of the cycle. In a well-known critique of post-war modernism (as outlined in Chapter 1), Adorno argued that what were considered to be objective procedures in music were the product of an impoverished subjectivity.120 Stockhausen, too, recognized the limitations of a constructivist aesthetic, initially by turning to intuitive music and then by seeking to use recognizable gestures. However, his attempt to convey essential human qualities in Licht verges on replacing an abstract order with a mythological one, in which subjectivity is still located at the level of the system: one in which transcendental authority appears as the flip-side of material objectivity. The problem is that this approach naturalizes human behaviour, such as the kind of essentialized gender roles that were hotly contested in the later twentieth century, instead of relating its features to particular times, places and values. There is no doubt that Stockhausen understood the edifice on a timeless level: ‘I wanted to write a cosmological composition that answers to the truth from now and always; I wanted to flee from the temptation to write a historical work.’121 Inevitably, however, Stockhausen’s own historical location is not absent from the conception, and the composer even included aspects of his own biography in the cycle, especially in Donnerstag, and wrote roles with members of his extended family in mind as performers. For all its use of recent technology and for all its musical inventiveness, Licht’s answer to the diremptive forces of modernity is a pre-modernity that fits all too neatly with Habermas’s diagnosis of a ‘new obscurity’ in the 1980s, because it presents subjectivity more as a condition than as something to be negotiated interactively.122 Stockhausen did not exhaust his grandiose tendencies with Licht, because in the last years of his life he worked on the Klang cycle of twenty-four pieces intended for every hour of the day, of which he completed twenty-one. Ligeti and Nono both had marked late styles in the 1980s, and it is arguable that Stockhausen did as well in his work from the 1980s and 1990s, which consolidated the formula principle and continued with attempts to communicate cosmological principles. Prometeo and Licht have something in common because they both turned to mythology; the big difference was that while Nono sought to expose historically rooted social contradictions through heightened perception, Stockhausen sought to obviate such tensions through transcendence. In his pioneering days, Stockhausen was more a leading member of the international avant-garde than a specifically German composer, unless one considers his interest in systems to be representative of German music. The new-age path he trod from the 1970s, as the category of the international

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avant-garde became more fragile, continued to be global in perspective, but it also demonstrated an interest in the systematic exploration of mythology that is somewhat Wagnerian. This was the background against which Lachenmann and Rihm emerged as more explicitly German composers than, with the exception of Killmayer, any of the figures discussed in this chapter.

3 The refusal of habit: Helmut Lachenmann

‘Klangtypen’ and ‘musique concrète instrumentale’

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After a conventional musical training, Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) attended the Darmstadt summer courses for the first time in 1957, at which point the post-war momentum associated with the events was in full force. Having met Nono on this occasion, the young composer went to study with him in Venice from 1958 to 1960. The following comment that Lachenmann made about his former teacher in 1991, after his death, indicates why the two composers found kindred spirits in each other: ‘Nono the structuralist constantly forced Nono the expressively orientated visionary to forge his way ahead.’1 For the student composer, too, structure and expression were inextricably linked. Lachenmann also attended seminars with Stockhausen, among others, in Cologne from 1963 to 1964. In 1972 he taught for the first time at the Darmstadt summer courses, and has remained closely associated with them ever since; and from 1981 to 1999, he was professor of composition at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. As this biographical sketch might suggest, scores by Lachenmann date back to 1956. But in keeping with the time frame of this volume, the current chapter concentrates on Lachenmann’s output from 1968, the point at which he emerged as a distinctive voice in West Germany. The essay ‘Klangtypen der Neuen Musik’ (‘Sound-Types of New Music’) constitutes Lachenmann’s first theoretical exposition of his compositional and aesthetic approach; it derives from 1966 but was revised in 1993, which explains the presence of examples from the composer’s own Kontrakadenz (1971) in the version that appears in Lachenmann’s collected writings, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. ‘Klangtypen’ represents an attempt to generate a creative intersection between the serialism of the 1950s and the sonorism of the 1960s by taking the connection found in serial music between detail and form as the basis for developing structural interactions between sonorities. In an attempt to invert the serial approach of the 1950s to the structuring of sound (‘Strukturklang’), the essay argues that sounds, or sonorities, should become the medium through which structure, or form, is achieved (‘Klangstruktur’), so that timbral sonorities become so intrinsic to the music that they are inseparable from its conception. Music devised according to this principle cannot, therefore, be arranged for different

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instrumentation: ‘Klangstruktur’ specifies timbre in a way that makes it an integral part of the musical fabric. The preoccupation, though, is not so much with timbre itself as with how to create timbral processes – with how to enable transitions from one energy state to another, and with how to create structure from elaborations of basic gestures. This orientation involves a rebalancing of priorities more than a break with the past, because Lachenmann finds plenty of examples of sound structure in serial music from the 1950s (indeed, he also discovers instances in the music of Chopin and Debusssy). Nono, as might be expected, provides material (La terra e la compagna, 1957), but the main source is Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1957). From only four years later, Ligeti’s Atmosphères (1961), not surprisingly, serves as the principal exemplar of sonorism. This combination of Nono’s innovations from the 1950s, Stockhausen’s contemporaneous structural approach to timbre, and Ligeti’s sonorism from the 1960s proved to be something of a benchmark for Lachenmann’s theoretical writings. The notion of ‘Klangstruktur’ has remained present in all of Lachenmann’s subsequent activity, even though it was quickly subjected to modification at a crucial stage in the composer’s career, with the writing of such scores as temA and Pression, which are strongly associated with the development of the idea of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’. Lachenmann derived the notion of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ from Pierre Schaeffer’s concept, originating in the 1940s, of ‘musique concrète’ – music that deploys recorded sounds as opposed to electronically generated sounds.2 Lachenmann’s nomenclature, which stems from the late 1960s, differs significantly from Schaeffer’s understanding of ‘musique concrète’ by signifying not recorded events but a type of music in which the kinetic action required to produce instrumental sounds is paramount. It thereby draws a direct link between the mechanical production of a sound and its associated energy. In addition, then, to turning the serialist preoccupation with organizing sounds into a preference for putting structures at the disposal of sonorities, Lachenmann places a high value on the energy generated by the production of these sounds. The derivation of the term ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ from Schaeffer’s terminology and practice is so palpable that it perhaps disguises the presence of other precedents. Richard Toop, for example, suggests that Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964), which explores the relationship between the physical actions carried out on a tam-tam and the resulting acoustic outcomes, provides a plausible model.3 Furthermore, Kagel’s innovations from the early 1960s are another possible influence on Lachenmann’s thinking. Describing Kagel’s Match (1964) – in which a

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percussionist ‘referees’ tennis-like exchanges between two cellists – Heile, in a remark that could almost be a definition of Lachenmann’s concept of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’, comments that ‘the instrumental playing has to be regarded as a fusion of kinetic energy with its acoustic result’.4 Despite this convergence, Lachenmann nevertheless remains very different to Kagel, because his notion of visible instrumental actions stops well short of Kagel’s more expansive concept of instrumental theatre, and his broader aesthetic does not share Kagel’s developed sense of irony. It is clear, then, that Lachenmann’s development was influenced by two major post-serial currents in the 1960s, sonorism and instrumental theatre, though his tendency as a commentator to lump these strands together in a disparaging manner tends to disguise their importance for him, as discussed in the final section of this chapter. He certainly absorbed these influences in a very distinctive way, and the resulting notion of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ has remained an important, although not unchanging, ingredient in Lachenmann’s music ever since. The ‘refusal of habit’ is an idea that developed in tandem with the practice of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’, because beyond a simple practice of negation, it is about enhancing perception by subverting expectation. As Lachenmann explains in connection with temA, Pression and Air, the refusal of habit is linked to the idea of confronting the accepted conditions of beauty.5

Notturno, temA and Pression Initiated in 1966 and completed in 1968, after interruptions, Notturno for chamber orchestra with solo cello is, by Lachenmann’s own estimation, an important score in his development because two different aesthetic approaches meet in the piece. This co-existence happens because, as Lachenmann recalls in an interview from 1993, temA was written after he broke off work on Notturno, with the consequence that when he came back to Notturno his approach to composition had changed.6 The first of these approaches, which Lachenmann calls ‘sound as a result and expression of abstract ordering of ideas’, relates to the serial past; the second offers a reversal, whereby he states that ‘every order should serve the most possibly concrete and unmediated sound realism’.7 What is more, Lachenmann adds that one of the tasks of the solo part is to negotiate between these two positions. In effect, Lachenmann’s portrayal of the piece describes a process whereby vestiges of serial technique serve not as an end in themselves, but as ways of producing concrete sounds, in accordance with his newly developed preoccupations. The following note from the explanation of notation at the beginning of the score is certainly commensurate with the idea of ‘musique

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concrète instrumentale’: ‘The indications of volume in quotation marks have a relative meaning: they show the intensity of the action but not the actually resulting volume, which is generally weaker.’8 It is not hard to hear the two differing approaches at work in the music. Despite the range of extended techniques that are specified in the score’s instructions, the opening instrumental textures do indeed sound like relatively conventional serial textures. From the outset, however, the cello writing concentrates mainly on sonorities that could not be integrated into an order dependent on pitch – a tendency that becomes more extreme in the soloist’s subsequent extended cadenza. In approximately the last third of the score, the new aesthetic starts to dominate as the orchestral writing resorts increasingly to the types of extended technique that were previously associated with the solo writing. For example, late in the piece (bar 290) the viola players are asked to rotate a loosely applied bow stick on the surface of the strings. For this and other extended techniques, Lachenmann uses what he calls his ‘bridge clef’, which he deploys extensively in later scores. In essence, this clef is a diagrammatic depiction of the fingerboard, strings, bridge and tailpiece, which shows the performer where to make contact with the instrument. Near the end, furthermore, all the string players are asked to hiss, an action that serves not only to introduce a new sonority, but also to challenge the notion of musicians being confined to one instrument and one mode of sound production. It would be an exaggeration to say that Notturno starts out as serial music and becomes ‘musique concrète instrumentale’, because the cello part draws on both areas for much of the work. Nevertheless, the latter technique does become more prevalent, though not exclusive, as the score progresses, and as the cello writing impacts increasingly on the orchestral sound. A good reason for starting this book in 1968 is that this year, by Lachenmann’s own estimation, marked the emergence of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ in his temA, for flute, voice and cello.9 The title of the piece certainly indicates that it is music in which the mechanical conditions of its sound production are paramount: an anagram of ‘Atem’, meaning breath, the word ‘temA’ manages to convey that breath is the theme (Thema) of the piece, while the capital letter indicates that phonetic preoccupations are predominant. The breathy and semi-vocalized exchanges between the voice and the flute provide the most obvious enactments of the sound production mechanisms to which the title alludes. More generally, though, the score is notable for the ways in which extended techniques enable all three instruments to produce complementary sonorities: the cello interacts with the flute by using fast runs of harmonics; the cellist also responds to the voice since, in a significant departure from

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normal expectations, the performer is required to produce a few vocal, phonetic sounds; and the voice intersects with the cello by using ‘rattling’ and ‘snoring’ tremolo-like sounds. Lachenmann’s programme note for temA quickly establishes a context for the piece, while not failing to assert its originality. Nevertheless, it is worth bearing in mind that these comments were written in 1983, some fifteen years after the music, and thus offer a degree of retrospective consolidation. Lachenmann acknowledges a shared interest with Ligeti’s Aventures (1963) in thematizing the acoustic energy of breath, he recognizes more distant affinities with scores by Stockhausen (he mentions Hymnen, 1967, with its electronically modified vocality), and he alludes to unspecified pieces by Kagel and Schnebel. Since he refers elsewhere to Kagel’s Sonant (1960) and to Schnebel’s glossolalie (1960), it is likely that these are the scores in question. Sonant places a possibly influential emphasis on the kinetic instrumental action required to produce sounds. Schnebel’s glossolalie, though, offers a more direct parallel with temA on account of its extended vocality, even if its evocation of heightened religious intensity is at some distance from Lachenmann’s more sober concerns. The way in which Lachenmann distances himself from Aventures, Sonant and glossolalie, the way in which he ‘has his cake and eats it’ so to speak, is to argue that temA is disconcerting because, instead of using Dadaist sounds playfully, it takes them seriously by placing them in a compositional logic.10 In other words, temA pushes beyond the ostensible shock value of comparable scores from the 1960s in order to develop something more significant. The implication is that the systematic deployment of these sounds makes them less amenable to assimilation by bourgeois institutions than those produced less coherently by other composers at the time. The idea of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ is the main focus of Pression, for a cellist (1970). It is a preoccupation that is evident in the title, meaning ‘pressure’, which is not a metaphor for the unfolding of material in the piece but instead a designation of the procedures required for performance. Indeed, the preface to the score states: ‘Except for places where pitches are notated in the traditional manner, the notation of this piece does not indicate the sounds, but the player’s actions.’11 Moreover, the visual dimension of these actions is recognized in a request not to obscure the cellist with a music stand. With a more graphic appearance than most of Lachenmann’s compositions, the score uses upward-pointing note stems for the right hand and downward-pointing stems for the left hand. In addition, it includes plenty of verbal instructions, together with some diagrams showing how the instrument is to be played for certain passages; and it calls for scordatura tuning.

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In keeping with Lachenmann’s aim of challenging the bourgeois fixation with beautiful sound, many of the sonorities, featuring a range of snoring, bouncing and wiping sounds, are scarcely recognizable as being produced by a cello. Nevertheless, the last page contains a sustained, normal tone, which almost sounds like a special effect in this context. As Lachenmann suggests in his programme note, the listener experiences ‘under which conditions, with which materials, with which energies and against which resistances a sound- or noise-action is implemented’.12

Air and Kontrakadenz Lachenmann has written a good number of scores for orchestra, despite being somewhat ambivalent about the medium. For him the dilemma is that the orchestra as traditionally constituted is firmly bonded to the bourgeois values that his aesthetic seeks to displace, but at the same time it offers an extended palette of textural possibilities. The result is a dialectical tension in which the composer expands the sonic scope of the orchestra, while challenging many of its customs and practices. That he has encountered resistance from orchestras in the course of his career, as mentioned in the discussion of Staub below, is not unexpected, because he has sought to overturn many of the institutional values upon which orchestral musicians depend for their livelihood. Nevertheless, it is hard to think of another composer of Lachenmann’s generation who has composed so consistently for the orchestra. Air (1969, revised 1994) marked Lachenmann’s arrival as an orchestral composer with what he conceives as a protest against ‘polished orchestral epicurism’.13 It was no surprise, therefore, that the Hesse Radio Symphony Orchestra, which premiered the score in Frankfurt am Main, expressed some doubts about the extended techniques required.14 Air is a four-part work scored for large orchestra and solo percussion, and includes a cadenza for the soloists. The massively expanded percussion section exerts a strong influence on the orchestral sound, with other instruments being scored in such a way that they become an extension of this domain. The title, which uses the English word ‘air’ rather than the German ‘Luft’, is intended to evoke the element in which sound is transmitted. Lachenmann also points out other connotations of the word, drawing attention to its associations with song form and to the fact that it is the name of a popular piece by Bach (he is probably alluding to the ‘Air’ from the Third Orchestral Suite, BWV 1068, better known as ‘Air on a G String’). In terms of wind instruments, air is the medium used to generate beautiful sounds in traditional music, but one that is not meant to draw attention to itself by, for example, escaping from a mouthpiece.15 In many of Lachenmann’s scores, by contrast, it is an audible presence, because wind

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players blow air through their instruments without any other tone being produced. Less specifically, though, all instruments make sound by movement in air, and it is the same medium that carries the resulting sound waves – a dual purpose clearly illustrated by the actions of a timpanist. Air makes this dual role more apparent by scoring for unusual instruments such as riding crops that are visibly cracked in the air, thereby evoking both movement and transmission (later on they are broken in an antiauthoritarian gesture). Indeed, Lachenmann writes of whipped air, rubbed hide, broken wood, struck metal and squeaking strings, as well as the oscillating air columns of wind instruments.16 As the element through which sound travels, the word ‘air’ therefore touches on some of the central preoccupations of Lachenmann’s notion of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ by alluding to the mechanical and kinetic conditions of sound production. As a score that sets out many of what were to be Lachenmann’s preoccupations in subsequent years, Air is also important for understanding the notion of ‘structure as a polyphony of orders’, as realized in this score by envisaging superimposed families of instruments as ‘organ manuals’.17 In relation to his structural diagram of bars 150–60 (shown in Ex. 3.1), Lachenmann identifies four overlapping ‘manuals’: a sequence of different wiping movements on skin instruments (Fell), a sequence of rhythmically complex riding crop (Gerten) cracks through the air, a rhythmic structure of blown guiros, and finally, a sequence of more or less toneless blown combinations of flutes and brass instruments (Bläser).18 Together, these patterns accumulate to form what the composer calls the ‘rhythmic net’, which he notates at the top of the diagram. After its Frankfurt premiere, Air was played at the politically charged 1969 Darmstadt summer course, the year in which there were daily performances of texts from Stockhausen’s meditative Aus den sieben Tagen. The contrast between the mindsets embodied in these works is huge, even though Air is indebted to Stockhausen’s wider interest in sound production, because, unlike the Aus den sieben Tagen pieces which seek a higher plane of consciousness, Air aims to overturn the bourgeois aesthetics of Philharmonic culture: in the composer’s words: ‘Every moment of this piece is orientated by the dialectic of the familiar becoming the estranged.’19 In an interview from 1993, Lachenmann states clearly that temA, Air and Pression (scores strongly associated with the development of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’) were written at the time of student unrest, adding that the refusal of beauty needs to be explained in this context as an attempt at a moral-polemical gesture.20 Indeed it is reasonable to understand Lachenmann’s challenge to orchestral norms in terms of the anti-institutional thrust of the protest movements. Nevertheless, it

Ex. 3.1 Helmut Lachenmann, Air, bars 150–60, as depicted in Lachenmann’s structural diagram from Musik als existentielle Erfahrung (Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 126)

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does not take too much imagination to find a more direct link between Air and the events of 1968, given that the score calls for two starting pistols, and that there is a ‘shot’ in the second bar (131) of a section appropriately marked ‘alla Marcia’. Writing of the ‘shots’, Rainer Nonnenmann comments that ‘for the audience at the Frankfurt première in 1969, they might have brought to mind those fired at the student Benno Ohnesorg and the leading student activist Rudi Dutschke’.21 As one might expect, this passage in Air is not an isolated event, but instead part of a range of ‘shots’ emanating from the extensive percussion section and from a plethora of string pizzicati. Such associations notwithstanding, Lachenmann’s engagement with the events of 1968 is not straightforward, because he correlates them with pseudo-radicalism in music. While supporting the political aims of social protest, Lachenmann explains his position as follows: Then, as now, I was of the opinion that art can only contribute to raising awareness in so far as, as art, it evokes the bourgeois (meaning: revolutionary) tradition and pursues immanent innovation through aesthetic categories, confronting the given historical, social situation, as reflected in the dominant cultural practice.22

Accordingly, Lachenmann’s polemics are more likely to take the form of a departure from convention, through the refusal of habit, than to initiate direct political engagement. Nevertheless, the extended sonic resources called for in Air exceed the degree of avant-gardist provocation found in most of his scores. In addition to the riding crops and starting pistols, the score asks for ‘alarm whistles’ (police whistles, in effect), electric doorbells, dried branches which are audibly snapped, and eight toy frogs (the ‘frog’ in question, the score explains, is a child’s toy made of tin; when pressed it springs backwards making a ‘sharp, cracking noise’). What is more, the toy frogs, which are much in evidence at the conclusion of the score, are included in neither the orchestral nor the solo percussion sections but are instead entrusted to wind players, who are thereby encouraged to extend their sonic roles. Air also requires two horns filled with water (‘water horns’), which make a gurgling sound, thereby using a feature of the instrument that players normally avoid assiduously; indeed, the sight of horn players ‘emptying out’ is one that frequently draws the attention of audiences. Although these sounds are part of a nuanced sound spectrum, Air is testimony that some of the most distinctive features of Lachenmann’s music derive from a time of political turbulence and hope. Kontrakadenz (1971) is scored for a huge orchestra which includes an electric guitar, a Hammond organ, a piano, four descant recorder heads and

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Ex. 3.2 Lachenmann, Kontrakadenz, bars 22–4, showing percussion and table-tennis balls

six percussionists. Furthermore, Lachenmann asks for a specific layout of the orchestra, mingling strings, wind, brass and percussion in wedges fanning out from the conductor, with four ‘ad hoc’ performers placed conspicuously at the back of the orchestra. The latter play a range of additional ‘instruments’, and although these are, perhaps, of their time, the ways in which the composer scores for them are revealing. One of the most distinctive sounds to be heard early in the piece (from bar 22) is the result of table-tennis balls being dropped onto a resonant table top, and the rhythmic acceleration as the bounces become smaller is notated in the score. This sound is reverberated around the orchestra: by legno saltando in the strings, including the electric guitar (played with a violin bow), by a glissando in the timpani, and by the bongos being struck with a bouncing mallet (the sixth line of the percussion in Ex. 3.2). This rebounding

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sonority then mutates into a related one, also based on transformed momentum, in which plates of various sizes and materials are spun while large coins are twirled on a range of drum heads. Interestingly, these actions produce something like a retrograde of the effect generated by the bouncing tabletennis balls because they spin fast initially, before gradually becoming slower. Kontrakadenz also calls for radios, which are tuned to VHF or short wave; when these are not in use their volume controls are turned right down. The scoring for radios is akin to that for instrumental lines: the rhythms are precise, and a range of dynamics serves to phase them in and out of the texture. Often their interjections are too brief to be recognizable, but in some of them snippets of music and speech do emerge. Using sound reproduction technology to generate rhythmic bursts of sound prompts comparisons with the role of the tape in the later Accanto. The main difference is that Kontrakadenz deploys the radios principally to provide sonority, while Accanto uses the tape as a way of engaging with the aura of Mozart’s concerto. John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for twelve radios (1951) provides an essential reference point for the use of radios as instruments rather than as passive media for transmission. Closer in time and place to Kontrakadenz, the collages of recorded broadcasts used in Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter may well have exerted an influence. A section in which the radios feature prominently concludes (bar 187) with a radio-style announcement from a tape of ‘Kontrakadenz von Helmut Lachenmann’, along with appropriate details of the orchestra and conductor. Cleverly switching the role of the radios back from that of instruments to a broadcasting medium, this information directly invokes the institutions of music, of new music in particular, which at that time depended heavily on the radio as a means of dissemination. Toop draws attention to a precedent for this self-reflection in the third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), which includes a broadcast-like acknowledgement of the performers.23 More broadly, the device serves to blur the distinction between the construction and reception of music. A particularly idiosyncratic sound in Kontrakadenz is generated by the presence of two metal bath tubs, partly filled with water. At bar 235, the complex sounds of the score die away, leading to an unmetred passage of about 25 seconds that might be considered a cadenza – or the contracadenza suggested by the score’s title – in which the swirling and lapping of the water in the tubs is the only sound to be heard. (A comparable moment takes place in Air when the solo radiance of the Japanese temple gong becomes the prevalent sonority at bar 231.) Shortly afterwards, the directly associated sound of water gongs is heard. What is interesting is the way these two passages are connected by metallic sounds that have more to

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do with the visual appearance of the tubs and gongs than with the sounds emanating from them. There is something reassuring about the swirling sounds, which for Lachenmann evoke childhood memories of being bathed in such a container by his mother,24 despite associations with a basic standard of living. Building on the model provided by Lachenmann, it is not hard to correlate the spinning coins, the twirling plates and the bouncing table-tennis balls with playful images of childhood. Even the recorder heads evoke a shrill sound associated with childhood (nearly all children who receive recorder lessons make this noise), albeit one with less nostalgic associations! The ‘ad hoc’ elements in Kontrakadenz simultaneously extend the timbral resources of the orchestra and challenge its institutional conventions. These extended elements certainly exert a marked influence on the character of the piece: for example, the passage between bars 313 and 441, which is to be repeated at least five times, may well reflect the bouncing repetitions in the piece, not least because it includes a marked crescendo that intuitively brings to mind the crescendi of the bouncing patterns. Furthermore, the distinctive high sounds of the recorder heads, often placed in combination with the Hammond organ, create a coda-like atmosphere at the work’s conclusion. In Kontrakadenz and Air there is a tension between such refinement of sound and the tendency for the presence of everyday sounds in the concert hall to blur the boundary between art and life, even if Lachenmann does not go as far in this direction as Kagel and Cage.

Engaging tradition In the first phase of his career, Lachenmann links the notion of sonority as a structural determinant to the corporal energy of sounds, as part of a more general refusal of tonality and its associated conventions. Subsequently, he became more actively concerned with the meanings embedded in musical gestures. In the essay ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, which was completed in the same year as Accanto (1976), Lachenmann indicates that he was exercised by what he considered to be the unwelcome return of the bourgeois concept of beauty in the 1970s, whether in sonorism, meditative music, tonalism or academicism.25 In the subsequent essay ‘Bedingungen des Materials: Stichworte zur Praxis der Theoriebildung’ (‘Conditions of Material: Notes on the Practice of Theory Building’) Lachenmann links the domains of tonality and tradition, which he had previously subsumed under the category of beauty, to the concept of ‘aura’.26 He delivered ‘Bedingungen des Materials’ at the Darmstadt summer course of 1978, the year that came

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to be most strongly associated with the arrival of neo-Romanticism, as demonstrated by Hans-Jürgen von Bose’s evocation of the category of beauty in his lecture from that course ‘Suche nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’ (‘In Search of a New Beauty-Ideal’). Later on, in the essay ‘On Structuralism’ (1990), Lachenmann provides a modified version of the four aspects of material listed in ‘Bedingungen des Materials’: tonality and tradition (referring to the context of surviving tonal gestures such as patterns of tension and release), the sensory (which has to do with perception, the energy of sounds and sound typology), the structural (which has to do with a ‘polyphony of ordered juxtapositions’, and with the interplay of order and disorder) and aura (‘the realm of association, memories, archetypal magical predeterminations’).27 Broadly speaking, the sensory and the structural are the categories described in the earlier essay ‘Klangtypen’, and the tonal and the auratic relate to the tendency, starting most obviously with Accanto, to engage with existing music, although the

Fig. 2 Helmut Lachenmann at the 29th Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1978.

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two categories are not easily separated because the aura of a sound is often connected to its tonal meaning. An ensemble of ideas is, then, at work in Lachenmann’s musical thinking in the second half of the 1970s: ‘Klangstruktur’ as way of organizing timbral fields that is influenced by sonorism, a focus on the energy of sound production that is affected by ideas of instrumental theatre, and aura as a way of engaging with the past that is a response to a wider retrospective tendency at this time.

Accanto and Salut für Caudwell It is in Schwankungen am Rand, for brass and strings (1975), that Lachenmann for the first time links the mechanical energies of sounds to traditional playing techniques from the repertory, suggesting that the sounds ‘sway’ between these categories.28 This transition is, however, more obvious in Accanto (1976), for orchestra and clarinettist (playing a B♭ clarinet, a bass clarinet, and a further B♭ or A clarinet without mouthpiece), which engages one of the pinnacles of the repertoire – Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major, K622. Written in the last months of his life, this was Mozart’s final instrumental composition and one that possesses all the prestige of a late-style work. The Italian title of Lachenmann’s score, Accanto (meaning ‘nearby’ or ‘next door’), suggests proximity to a masterpiece; the manner in which this nearness manifests itself is that a recording of the concerto plays throughout the score, often subliminally but sometimes breaking through to the foreground of the texture in a variety of ways. Lachenmann specifies that the tape should be assembled without spaces between the movements so that it always sounds when needed, and that it should contain back-to-back recordings of the concerto in order to ensure that the Mozart strand does not finish before the end of Accanto. Although his instructions are for now-outdated playback equipment, his intentions are clear: enabling ‘very sudden fade-in and fadeout effects’ and the ‘transmissions of extremely short durations of tape segments’.29 The latter are heard, though not recognized, as early as bars 2 and 3 of the score, where the tape is played in semiquaver bursts. As a recorded object, instead of something arising from within the ensemble, the concerto occupies a different space to the orchestra. In this respect Accanto perhaps shows the multimedia influence of Kontrakadenz. Nevertheless, because it functions as an underlay and not as a structural template, the tape can be phased in and out of the texture as if it were another orchestral instrument. Initially the tape insertions register as something additional but unfamiliar in the orchestral texture. Then, at bar 194, we hear enough of the Mozart for it to become recognizable, at which point

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the underlying conceit comes into focus. Once the score has yielded its secret, the subsequent fragments of the recording are heard as semantically richer than their predecessors. The work can be divided into four sections, as Rainer Nonnenmann has suggested:30 part 1 (bars 1–79) is characterized by wispy fragments that gradually consolidate into scalic patterns, with much of the initial clarinet writing consisting of scarcely audible gestures; part 2 (bars 80–193) is characterized by pulsing textures, leading to a far-from-flamboyant cadenza; part 3 (bars 194–259) contains the main insertion of the Mozart, plus two others at bars 243 and 247, as well as phonetic outbursts from the solo clarinettist; and part 4 (bars 260–333) bears some resemblance to part 1 in its subdued textures and scalic passages. There is, therefore, the outline of a traditional arch form to the piece, with the breakthrough at bar 194 registering as the most remote material in the score. In an essay on Accanto, first given as a talk six years after the score was completed, Lachenmann writes of removing the language-context of familiar musical material and of establishing connections through a renewed ordering of its elements. The ‘language-context’ (‘Sprachzusammenhang’) of music is a phrase so redolent of what Adorno calls the ‘language-character’ (‘Sprachcharakter’) of music, as a way of referring to the accepted syntax of the tonal tradition – the conventions of harmony and counterpoint and their associated expressive formulae – that it is plausible to assume that Adorno’s thoughts in this area had achieved general currency.31 Adorno considered the loss of the language-character of music to be a defining feature of new music, and it is the expressive poignancy of this loss that is explored in Accanto.32 As the composer describes the piece, ‘the music, as already subverted language, gradually lets in such familiar speech clichés, in order finally to lay open its secret relationship to Mozart’s work’.33 In support of this explanation, he provides examples of this seepage, drawing attention to scale patterns (starting in the solo clarinet part at bar 52, see Ex. 3.3) and referring to triadic shapes in the orchestral fabric and the solo part (starting at bar 37). His approach to Mozart’s concerto is aimed more at salvage than transgression; indeed he even bears witness to a sense of loss, arguing that the toneless breathing heard in a passage from the final part (bar 294, which is repeated ten times) evokes the rocking accompanying figure at the beginning of the slow movement of Mozart’s concerto, thereby enabling the prospect of a concept of beauty that is capable of recognizing our contradictions and anxiety.34 Of course, the principal intertextual event is when Mozart’s concerto makes its decisive appearance in the texture, a moment that the composer considers to be a disconcerting confrontation.35 Put differently, it represents in the work the point of transition from the tape being deployed as a sound object to it

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Ex. 3.3 Lachenmann, Accanto, bars 60–1, showing scalic patterns in the clarinet part

assuming a hermeneutic presence. In the score (bar 192), it is possible to see that the soloist has a passage derived, as Nonnenmann indicates, from the C major idea that starts on the upbeat to bar 86 of Mozart’s first movement.36 There are, however, two reasons why this allusion will not be heard in performance: first, Lachenmann has reproduced the intervallic pattern so that the tonal origin of the passage can be recognized, but not the melodic shape; and second, this snippet is distorted because the composer asks for what might be called ‘instrumental Sprechstimme’ at this point. A comparable idea is found in the tuba part which, just after the recording breaks through, requires the player to shout rhythmically into the instrument ‘please add the excerpt’, registering the trauma of collision.37 In Eduard Brunner’s 1977 recording, it is the first episode from the rondo that is playing when the tape breaks through – a passage that provides a strong pulse for Lachenmann’s percussive textures to pick out.38 Indeed, it

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seems that Lachenmann intended some decision making since Accanto is a few minutes shorter than the Mozart, making his instruction to record the concerto twice somewhat redundant, unless he envisaged starting the tape somewhere other than at the beginning of the concerto. Accanto takes up the tempo of the Mozart insertion, but it does so by means of pulsing that is both timbrally removed from the concerto and rhythmically incongruent in its directness, harking back to the second section of the score where pulses are stacked in emerging and receding timbral layers. Lachenmann’s efforts to salvage Mozart through estrangement extend to what he calls the ‘customary instrumental codex’, by which he means the methods of production required for the (beautiful) sounds that instrumentalists traditionally try to achieve. The solo part in Accanto features a compendium of techniques, including tapping the mouthpiece to agitate the air column, playing rhythmically through the instrument without the mouthpiece, rattling the keys, playing multiphonics, and articulating phonemes through the instrument in a sort of speech. Indeed much of the initial clarinet writing consists of scarcely audible gestures that confound expectations of an extravagant soloistic display.39 Lachenmann argues that he is concerned in Accanto less with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto than with what it stands for in contemporary society.40 One of the things the score stands for, in his estimation, is a commodity fetish predicated on beautiful sounds. Accordingly, in Accanto and other pieces Lachenmann resists the seamless, detached quality of the commodity by relating sounds directly to the actions that produced them. His intention in Accanto, then, is to attempt to recover what might be called the truth value of Mozart’s concerto, which has become obscured by its institutional status. His hope, which is not unfounded, is that the fragments heard in Accanto will acquire a new vitality because they are experienced in a context that removes the gloss of what he calls the ‘oohs and aahs’.41 Much of Lachenmann’s critique of what Mozart’s concerto stands for is predicated on the notion that the subjectivity of the concerto has become swamped by its function as a luxury item of consumption. Consider the following statement from a recent interview: For the majority of people today, our traditional art and classical music in particular is used as this sort of magical paradise. A Mozart piano concerto might be offered as ‘music to dream by’, usable like a drug, an artificial paradise, which might help us to forget about our not-so-paradisiacal reality.42

The problem with this stance is that it assumes that production and reception map closely onto each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of false consciousness. At a theoretical level, it is difficult to maintain that

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the two domains are capable of achieving such a good homology, and at an everyday level it is even harder to dismiss the idea that an individual might use music actively to enhance a mood. Lachenmann’s notion of aura and his critique of the conventions of beauty are highly influenced by the recording industry; and even though this shaping force is not specifically acknowledged in his theoretical formulations, the presence of the tape in Accanto means that it is addressed in the compositional realm. Accanto was written at the height of classical music’s success with LP vinyl recording, challenging the prestige of the glossy objects manufactured by this market and the hi-fi cult that was so closely associated with its image of luxury and affluence. This historical moment is actively explored in Kagel’s film Ludwig van (as discussed in Chapter 2), where the Beethoven character visits a record shop in Bonn. In Accanto, the smooth recording is placed beside a live performance that is not seeking to emulate its prestige qualities at all – one in fact where the live clarinettist is attacking the conventions of the recording studio. In keeping with Kagel’s perspective, many of Lachenmann’s comments about performance practices, especially with regard to the concept of beauty, relate to the rich sound cultivated by the Berlin Philharmonic in the era of Herbert von Karajan. (In fact the argument made by Heinz-Klaus Metzger in Ludwig van, that Karajan’s pursuit of a beautiful sound detracts from Beethoven’s critical force, is very close to Lachenmann’s stance.)43 Lachenmann was not alone in expressing reservations about this approach to performance, for the reaction under the banner of what is now known as historically informed performance practice also gathered pace between the late 1960s and the 1980s – in other words, during the formative years of Lachenmann’s career. Like historically informed performance, Lachenmann tries to strip away the accumulated traditions associated with the classical repertoire, including the expectation nurtured by the record industry of a silky instrumental sound. Unlike historically informed performance, though, Accanto seeks not to recreate the strangeness of the past, but to use the rubble of Mozart’s style to defamiliarize the present: it is not authentic Mozart we hear in Accanto, but a contemporary response to the discourses that envelop Mozart. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that Lachenmann’s claim to be revealing the truth content of Mozart’s concerto is far more embedded in the historical dynamics of the 1970s than is initially evident. Accanto engages specifically with the commercial conventions of the vinyl era, with the full tone characteristic of associated performance practices (a fullness challenged also by the historically informed performance movement) and with the turn to the past in German music from the 1970s. There is, however, no denying the force of Accanto’s engagement with a particular

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representation of Mozart: when the extended fragment emerges, it does so with renewed intensity precisely because Lachenmann has defamiliarized its linguistic norms. If Accanto is understood as a compositional mode of reception, it becomes possible to release it from the grip of a productionbased aesthetics, so that it can be construed as a form of critical response to a particular set of values associated with the classical canon. For such an interpretation, Accanto is stimulating precisely because it offers an unstable blend of compositional logic and critical reception.44 Despite making forthright statements about the need to resist bourgeois traditions, Lachenmann is generally reluctant to align himself with any particular tradition of political thought. Nevertheless, two related ideas associated with western Marxism are clearly evident in his work. The first of these is ‘false consciousness’, which manifests itself in the belief that bourgeois music is somehow exempt from social antagonisms, as summed up in Marx’s sentence: ‘They don’t know it, but they do it.’45 The second is ‘ideology critique’, which reveals itself in the process of dismantling that belief. In the case of Salut für Caudwell, for two guitarists (1977), these two tenets emerge in relation to the English communist writer and poet Christopher Caudwell, who died in 1937 at the age of twenty-nine, fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Caudwell’s presence exerts itself in the score by means of words selected from a passage from the final chapter, ‘The Future of Poetry’, of the German translation of his Illusion and Reality, in which the proletariat explain that the bourgeois conception of freedom is socially determined.46 The same excerpts are also to be found at the opening of the essay from 1979 associated with this score, ‘Struktur und Musikantik’ (‘Structure and the Musicianly’), where they trigger discussion of an art form that is capable of expressing its social conditions.47 Lachenmann’s quotation finishes with the words: ‘You must take the difficult creative road – that of refashioning the categories and technique of art so that it expresses the new world coming into being and is part of its realisation. Then we shall say . . . ’ Interestingly, Caudwell’s complete sentence reads: ‘Then we shall say your art is proletarian and living.’ Lachenmann’s decision to omit this conclusion suggests that he finds common cause with the need for artistic activity to expose bourgeois illusions by expressing social conditions but wants to distance himself from Caudwell’s conviction that proletarian art is the vehicle of this disclosure. Certainly, Lachenmann’s explanation of how music since Schoenberg has responded to the bourgeois tradition in terms of ‘beauty experienced as the overcoming of habit’ owes more to Adorno’s sense of material discarding older positivities than it does to Caudwell’s vision of communist art.48 Indeed, the unambiguous tone of Caudwell’s writing lies closer to the political aspirations of Nono (Lachenmann’s one-time teacher) than to the younger composer’s

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preoccupation with heightened perception. As mentioned in Chapter 1 in relation to the Darmstadt summer course of 1972, Lachenmann takes the view that music does not have a direct political function.49 In relation to his decision to set words in his score, Lachenmann comments: ‘I constantly had the feeling that this music was “accompanying” something – if not a text, then individual words or thoughts’ – things, he adds, that are rendered unsuitable by the media.50 Moreover, he is very specific about how this blurring should be realized: his notes to the score instruct that the modified text should be read with a neutral expression, that it should be comprehensible, and that the indicated rhythms and phonetic articulation should be observed precisely. Although the text can be understood in performance, the phonetic emphasis of the setting has the effect of drawing attention more to the sounds of individual words than to the overall meaning of Caudwell’s sentences. The result is that the energized words interact with the guitar lines like another instrument. The score is a salute in a more literal sense than just using Caudwell’s words, because it also includes series of ‘shots’ that are articulated as abrupt, spread chords, each standing alone in its own space, as acutely demonstrated by bar 318, in which a single chord is repeated a minimum of six times (Ex. 3.4). These irregular events do indeed ring out with a brutality suggestive of the manner in which Caudwell died. (The detached arrows in Ex. 3.4 indicate downbeats and upbeats; the notated arrows indicate the hand directions in which the strings are to be brushed. The ‘G’ symbol indicates that a bottleneck is to be used, and the cross symbol indicates that the strings are to be damped with the arm.) Along with the context provided by Caudwell, Salut demonstrates Lachenmann’s new-found interest in estranging existing materials and their environments at this stage in his career. What is distinctive, however, is that Salut takes in not only the guitar’s classical, historical connections but also its folk and popular connotations, as well as its historical and geographical associations. The vernacular aspects are especially evident in the final section, where notated arrows direct brushing movements of the hand, sometimes along as well as across the strings, which produce allusions to the tango, while the rapid triplet interjections at the end hint at flamenco rhythms. The extent to which Salut departs from the conventions of guitar playing lends credence to Lachenmann’s contention that he simultaneously reinvented and simplified guitar technique.51 Indeed, it is easier to perform the piece with the guitars placed on tables than held across the body in the standard position (this situation is adapted in the Second String Quartet where, with the exception of the cello, the instruments are played in the guitar position late in the piece). Not surprisingly, strummed chords and melody-plus-accompaniment

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Ex. 3.4 Lachenmann, Salut für Caudwell, ‘shots’ (bars 313–18a)

patterns are conspicuous by their absence in Salut. But not all established techniques are jettisoned: barré stops, for example, are deployed extensively in order to move the same pattern around the fret board; and bottleneck slides are very much in evidence aurally. Another striking characteristic of the piece is that it is marked by several fast passages (for example, at bar 240 and bar 282, which is repeated ad lib.) that are characterized by fluttering arpeggio-like shapes, huge speed and energy. Reminiscent of tape loops, these segments function like brackets in the music, in the sense that they stand apart from the

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Table 3.1 Scheme in Lachenmann, Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied Part I Preamble (based around ‘Deutschlandlied’) bars 1–41 1. Introduction bars 1–5 2. Waltz bars 6–21 3. March bars 22–44 4. Transition bars 45–69

Part II 5. Siciliano bars 70–132b (includes Bach’s ‘pastoral symphony’ bars 101b–9b and ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’ bars 117–32) 6. Capriccio bars 133–92 7. Valse lente bars 193–247

Part III 8. Transition bars 248–78 9. Gigue bars 279–423 (includes ‘O du lieber Augustin’) 10. Tarantella bars 424–72 11. Transition bars 473–91 (includes ‘O du lieber Augustin’)

Part IV 12. Aria I bars 492–531 (includes ‘O du lieber Augustin’) 13. Polka bars 532–68 14. Aria II bars 569–609

Part V (based around ‘Deutschlandlied’) 15. Transition bars 610–20 17. Coda (Aria III) bars 753–819 (includes ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’ bars 774–92)

structural unfolding of the music. This novel writing combines with the genre associations and strong aesthetic environment to make Salut a central statement in Lachenmann’s output.

Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied and Ein Kinderspiel Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1980), scored for orchestra and amplified string quartet, is in five parts, with seventeen sections based around various dance forms (see Table 3.1). Like Accanto, Tanzsuite engages with existing music from the classical tradition, while following Salut für Caudwell in drawing on a wider range of musics. The main source of material in this score is Baroque dance forms, primarily those found in Bach’s suites and partitas, though not exclusively, because a polka, a tarantella and a galop are also included. These dances appear in barely recognizable guises, and Lachenmann draws attention more to the kinetic qualities of their roots than to their accreted associations. The score also contains four references to specific music, including, as its title suggests, Haydn’s Emperor’s Hymn, which eventually became ‘Deutschlandlied’ – the German national anthem. The other allusions are: the ‘pastoral symphony’ from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the lullaby ‘Schlaf,

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Kindlein, schlaf’ and the song ‘O du lieber Augustin’, which has a good track record since it also features in Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet. The ‘Deutschlandlied’ is present, if hardly conspicuous, in the solo quartet of the opening passage, but it appears a little more clearly in Part V, marked ‘Finale’, where Lachenmann even writes the title in the score and then places the words associated with the melody beneath the fragmented piano part. He establishes that the emphasis in using this symbolic tune is more on structure than on allusion: ‘When I take the German national anthem in Tanzsuite, it’s like a skeleton that now serves to help me articulate a characteristic time grid.’52 From the listener’s perspective, the general ambience of dance rhythms is easier to perceive than the more specific references in the score. In the same way that Accanto unpicks a certain representation of Mozart, Tanzsuite confronts the comfortable (commodified) associations of the dance forms on which it draws, with a view to locating their lost aesthetic potential. In an interesting argument, Lachenmann considers that the shapes of these dance forms embody, consciously and unconsciously, memories of a collective security, which he also associates with concepts such as home, tradition and yearning for childhood. By dismantling these shapes, the music attempts to reveal the illusory quality of these connections, to allow them to be experienced outside their usual context, and to intervene in the embodied immediacy of such pre-established elements.53 Given the prevalence of Baroque dance forms and a direct allusion to the Christmas Oratorio, such sentiments make it tempting to interpret this score as Adorno in motion. In a comparable manner to Lachenmann’s intentions, Adorno’s essay ‘Bach Defended against his Devotees’, which was published in the year (1951) after Bach’s bicentenary, aimed to reveal Bach’s music to be part of the dynamic of modernity, rather than something immutable and universal.54 Lachenmann has written in some detail about the Siciliano that opens the second part of Tanzsuite, and some of his comments reach beyond the Tanzsuite to offer more general insights into his multidimensional way of working. He indicates that the siciliano rhythm constitutes the basis for four stages in this section of the score: for a taut polyphony of figures (bars 70–100), for a ‘sonically alienated projection’ of Bach’s ‘pastoral symphony’ (bars 101b–9b), for an empty Morse code rhythm on the piano (bars 118a–18s), and finally for a quasi-ostinato (bars 119–32), leading into the following ‘Capriccio’.55 Bars 101–9 exist in ‘a’ and ‘b’ options, and the Bach allusion comes into play if the ‘b’ option is taken. In what Lachenmann chooses to label as subdivisions of bar 118, the music narrows to a point where the characteristic dotted rhythm is heard on the top two notes of the piano keyboard, as a tapping sound. It is from this reduced texture that Lachenmann generates the allusion to ‘Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf’ in the final section.

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Ex. 3.5 Lachenmann, Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, Siciliano, bars 70–83, as depicted in Lachenmann’s structural diagram from Musik als existentielle Erfahrung (Lachenmann, ‘Siciliano’, 181)

As regards the ‘polyphony of figures’, Lachenmann helpfully provides a diagram of bars 70–110 (see Ex. 3.5). Along the top is the siciliano rhythm, and below it are the ingredients that contribute, cumulatively, to this rhythm. These are: fragments of the dotted rhythm (which the diagram

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places in boxes), movement in crotchets, quavers and semiquavers (which the diagram indicates by an ‘R’ in a circle), sustained or tenuto elements (which the diagram indicates with the marking ‘ten’) and a range of ornaments such as trills and grace notes. These can be summarized as an interplay of closed and dispersed figures. Within this polyphony of figures, Lachenmann distinguishes between two types of ‘energy-determined corporality’, which apply not just to the Siciliano but also to the whole score.56 First he talks of blown, bowed, plucked and beaten sounds, as well as of more unusual modes of production such as wiped or pressed sounds, taking into account modifications such as muting and finger placement. These are indicated in Lachenmann’s diagram (Ex. 3.5) by the signs for bowed or blown tonelessly, wiped tonelessly, beaten (or struck), plucked, pressed, scratched, and bowed or blown normally. Second he writes of acoustic effects such as pitch, interval relations and noises. In association with the polyphony of figures, he speaks of sound characteristics being determined by the ways that vertical linking, or mixing, associates with the cumulative rhythm. Unlike the later ‘Reigen seliger Geister’, Tanzsuite does not include a time-net in the score, but Lachenmann acknowledges the presence of one as a compositional device. Talking of the opening section, for solo string quartet, he says the time-net becomes ‘regulated by rhythmic structures, which can be recalled as the skeleton of a well-known homely experience’.57 As mentioned, the skeleton in question here is that of the ‘Deutschlandlied’; and in his diagram of the opening section Lachenmann puts its words under the gestures to show the derivation.58 As is often the case in his quartet writing, he talks of the ensemble in this solo passage as a single instrument. The rhythm Lachenmann includes in his diagram of the Siciliano is more an indication of what actually takes place than a prescriptive compositional plan. Indeed, Pietro Cavallotti has demonstrated that there is a tendency in this score for events to take on a life of their own,59 a quality that is in keeping with Lachenmann’s understanding of musical structure ‘not just as an experience of order, organization, but also as an experience of disorganization – an ambivalent product of construction and destruction’.60 Furthermore, it is not just a matter of internal consistency, because Tanzsuite embodies a tension between post-serial organization and the experiential quality of sounds evoked by aura and tradition, to the extent that Lachenmann acknowledges that when the latter two become involved, ‘the material the composer is supposed to order is no longer easy to measure or regulate’.61 Lachenmann’s phrase ‘energy-determined corporality’, used earlier, refers to the sounds and instruments, and to the dismantling and rebuilding of dance forms. At the same time, it evokes the way pulsions and intensities

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form energy fields in their own right and refers to the corporal origins of dance forms. It is as if the regulated somatic associations of the dance encounter a less refined, less hierarchical sense of the body. The process is, however, ambiguous. Do these intensities reveal something latent in the dance forms? Or do they serve to bring the dance forms into contact with a different order of experience? Most likely, it is a bit of both, and the proportions of the mix will change according to what performers and listeners bring to the music. More than dismantling tradition, this music overturns its established categories. Lachenmann explains that Ein Kinderspiel, seven small pieces for piano (1980), is neither pedagogical music nor music intended especially for children, since the musical experience of childhood is part of every adult’s inner world. Following on from Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied and pursuing ideas from Salut für Caudwell, this collection of seven pieces continues with the notion of projecting structural thinking onto already existing forms and patterns, such as children’s songs, dance forms and easy fingering techniques. Lachenmann comments: ‘The result of all this is something easy to play and easy to understand: a children’s game but aesthetic, without compromises.’62 When he says ‘without compromises’, he provides a clear indication that the music addresses his central concern with breaking through prefabricated responses, which in this case becomes focused on the clichés associated with the experience of childhood. Just as he wants to retain from the bourgeois music tradition a sense of enlightenment by challenging accepted practices, so in this case he wants to retain a sense of childlike wonder without succumbing to a magic-of-childhood rhetoric, with its associations of security. Thus, there are three intersecting dimensions at play in this music – musical traditions, notions of childhood and the conventions of piano pedagogy – which Lachenmann proceeds to interrogate and transform.63 The opening piece, ‘Hänschen klein’, uses as a rhythmic skeleton the eponymous German children’s song (the tune is known in Great Britain as ‘Little bird, I have heard’) as a way of accessing a stratum of shared childhood experience. Lachenmann leaves the rhythm of the song more or less intact, but turns the melody into a chromatic line which descends from the top to the bottom of the keyboard using all eighty-eight keys so that the familiarity of the song and the pedagogy of the chromatic scale are both unsettled. Because the music starts on the highest note of the piano keyboard, the pitch is initially quite close to noise; and this quality is revisited when the descending line is resonated in bars 5–8 by a silently held octave cluster containing all chromatic notes in the extreme bass register. In the next statement, the melody itself becomes a cluster, as the notes are held down after sounding. ‘Hänschen klein’ concludes with the

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pedal being held down while the melody descends to the extreme depths of register, culminating in a bass ‘roar’ from the body of the piano that is far removed from the domain of nursery rhymes. The prominent use of resonance, with and without the sustaining pedal, constitutes an important mechanism for defamiliarizing material in this piece, anticipating the tour de force of the final number of the set. ‘Wolken im eisigen Mondlicht’ creates a sense of stillness from five-finger patterns, changing the articulation of notes within the configurations by deploying rhythmic pedalling; it also uses the silently held lowest octave cluster found in the opening piece, which becomes more prominent when it is combined with the rhythmic pedalling. This bass cluster idea is evident too in the following ‘Akiko’, with the clusters in the right hand adding to the aggregate of notes. ‘Falscher Chinese’ uses familiar triadic shapes in the left and right hands, but puts them in the same register so as to create cluster sonorities. Resonance is the primary idea of the fifth piece, as its title ‘FilterSchaukel’ suggests, and it is achieved this time primarily by sustaining and releasing notes within a chord. In ‘Glockenturm’, the extremes of the keyboard return, although in keeping with the bell idea the bass notes are struck before being released and held silently. In the final piece of the set, ‘Schattentanz’ (‘Shadow Dance’), the dimensions of childhood and piano pedagogy that Lachenmann mentions are jointly suggested by the restricted array of notes and by the right-hand dance rhythms. Extremes of register appear again: the right hand is restricted entirely to the B and C at the top of the keyboard, and the left hand is confined to a silently held full chromatic cluster in the lowest octave of the keyboard, as also found in ‘Hänschen klein’. Because only two elements are used, the music is dependent on pedalling, articulation and dynamics to create interest amidst the repetition. Tradition is evoked by rhythmic gestures reminiscent of a gigue – or even a jig – that use the same notes and register, along with a closely related rhythmic figure, as the piano solo in the Siciliano from Tanzsuite, again evoking the kinetic qualities of Baroque dance forms. Furthermore, the nearly dematerialized interplay of triple and dotted motifs is cast in a modified rondo scheme, according to the composer.64 It possibly also alludes to the forging motif from Wagner’s Das Rheingold; the metallic sound produced at the top of the piano adds to this possibility, as does the cavernous bass resonance. Whatever its origin, this shape becomes fragmented into broken figures (perhaps the episodes of the ‘rondo’) which are articulated by the rhythmic pressing and release of the pedal. Indeed, this pedal action eventually becomes an idea of its own, since the final bar is a repeated, ‘marcato’, solo for unaccompanied pedal (see Ex. 3.6).

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Ex. 3.6 Lachenmann, Ein Kinderspiel, the end of ‘Schattentanz’

The shadow dance of the title describes well the variations in right-hand dynamics by which one pattern sounds like a pale reflection of another. It also signifies the ways in which the left-hand cluster, with and without pedal, resonates and modifies the right-hand rhythm. Initially registering as a spectral presence, the bass cluster becomes a pronounced entity, offsetting the narrow right-hand pitches with a booming reverberation that brings the whole body of the piano into play. For Lachenmann, the clearly perceptible deep frequencies in this piece are a product of what he calls ‘interference’,65 but this observation does not do justice to the way in which the obsessive rhythm, as Martin Scherzinger suggests, starts to acknowledge an unexpected, phantasmagoric presence.66 Instead of functioning as an unacknowledged acoustic mirror, enhancing the quality of the sound without drawing attention to itself, the resonating body of the piano emerges with a voice of its own, altering the object to which it responds. As the medium becomes the message, the right-hand motivic shapes form an affinity with the cluster that cannot be understood entirely in conventional

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terms. The relationship between the two events is akin to that between objects in an installation, which interact primarily by means of proximity.

Mouvement, Ausklang, Staub and Second Quartet Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung), for Ensemble (1984) translates as Movement (– before Paralysis). It is possible to perceive aurally some of the sections of this score: there is one passage that is defined by the presence of a doorbell and, as in other pieces by this composer, there is another segment that is characterized by pulsing. Less evident to the listener, there is also a portion of the piece that is based around ‘O du lieber Augustin’ – again used more as a frame than as an allusion.67 The title of the score prompts a rather direct interpretation whereby music of agitated activity ceases to function, or becomes paralysed, in the two più calmo sections, one of which occurs about halfway through and the other at the conclusion of the score. Although the listener is free to pursue a direct hearing, the composer’s somewhat oblique programme note, which is in itself a creative act, prompts a more complicated approach. Using colourful imagery, the text evokes a music of dead movements, of the rubble of emptied rhythms, comparing them to a beetle floundering on its back; and it talks about the pseudo-activity of already paralysed rhythms. More directly, the composer adds: ‘The life included in this music is a process of composition and decomposition.’68 What Lachenmann appears to mean by this description is that gestures that are associated with movement become paralysed when their mechanisms are revealed, but at the same time the process by which this happens creates space for new possibilities.69 Since this score includes conventional pitches and intervals, the notion of dissection applies in this area as well as in the rhythmic domain. Thus Lachenmann’s imagery addresses the familiar theme of exploring the rubble of established formulae, with the emphasis on movement and motion in this case providing the score with its particular flavour. The gestures used in this exciting and colourful piece certainly relate to established mechanisms for conveying movement, but it is not clear that their vitality derives from the process of being unpicked; it may be that they are not so worn out, after all. Ausklang, for piano with orchestra (1985), creates visually the expectation of a piano concerto, an expectation that is consistently engaged throughout the piece, to the extent that bar 564 is marked ‘Cadenza ad lib’. It is more obviously a concerto than Accanto because of the displays from the piano, even though these are achieved in partnership with the orchestra. Like some pieces by Stockhausen, such as Punkte, the title

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conveys directly a major preoccupation in the score: it means ‘soundingout’ or ‘fading-out’, thereby drawing attention to an emphasis in the piece on the reverberation and decay of sound. Lachenmann’s programme note captures well the way intersections of tradition and innovation in this score turn on the idea of lost sound, suggesting that the history of piano music is characterized by attempts ‘to simulate situations of conquered gravity’.70 What he means by ‘conquering gravity’ is finding techniques for preventing the sounding strings of the piano from dying away. An obvious way in which the score engages with this historical problem in a modern manner is through fast, technically demanding repetitions of a single note, as well as through using methods with a precedent in Ein Kinderspiel, such as filtering by releasing notes, rhythmic pedalling and resonating silently held keys. In relation to the latter technique, the pianist is expected rapidly to move around the keyboard from one group of silent notes to another. Of course, the presence of the orchestra provides opportunities to extend the resonance idea, so that sustained textures in the piano are continued by breath sounds from the wind, by unpitched string timbres, by tuned percussion, which includes xylorimba, an orchestral piano, tubular bells and harp, and by brushing drum skins. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the solo piano produces short, sharp sounds in dialogue with the orchestra. There are fewer embargos on established sounds here than in earlier scores, and this increased freedom lends the music a certain opulence. There are chromatic runs, glissandi and great cascades in which triadic shapes move rapidly in arpeggio-like patterns. In one passage (bars 696–8), C major scales are combined with thick arpeggio-shaped chords, creating a somewhat disorienting effect: the C major scales do not sound correct because of the ‘wrong’ chords underneath, but they have sufficient scalic motion to ensure that the passage does not just feel like a succession of chords either. As in Ein Kinderspiel, the motor actions of piano pedagogy, such as shapes derived from fingering patterns, are reconstructed so as to yield unexpected meanings. The piece ends with the piano alone playing an E major chord; without pedal, it is left to fade away, perhaps indicating the ephemerality of even the most conventional gesture. Not only do these flourishes bring to mind the conventions of the piano literature, they also invoke its traditions of virtuosity, as do Ligeti’s piano Études and Kagel’s Passé composé. The differences, apart from the latter being solo scores, are also revealing: in Ausklang there is not the sense of a direct continuation of tradition that is found in the Études, nor is there a Kagelian sense of a copy without a model. Lachenmann continued his subversive encounter with piano writing in his substantial Serynade,

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Music for Piano (1998), elaborating on many of the techniques used in Ausklang. More immediately, Lachenmann wrote Allegro sostenuto, for clarinet/bass clarinet, cello and piano (1988), which builds on the idea of the way in which Ausklang produces an interplay of the kind of motion found in Mouvement with techniques for sustaining sound. This paradox is built into the idea of sustained sounds in an allegro tempo. Staub, for orchestra (1987), engages with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, no less. Although this context is not immediately obvious, the institutional aura of the Ninth contributed strongly to the reception of Staub. It was commissioned by the South-West Radio Baden-Baden Symphony Orchestra, which has a good track record for playing new music, as a prologue to the Ninth, to be performed at a concert in 1986 celebrating the orchestra’s fortieth anniversary. With Lachenmann already an established figure at this time, the nature of the music he was likely to compose was not in doubt. Nonetheless, the eminence of its composer did not deter the orchestral manager from cancelling the premiere of this score. Lachenmann explains that the decision was made because Staub was considered to be an unsuitable companion for Beethoven’s symphony and was deemed to be inappropriate music to perform in front of the then Baden-Baden federal minister.71 Ironically, this reactionary response did, at least, recognize that Staub challenges a set of conventions. What none of the protagonists in this dispute could have known at the time was that two years later the Ninth would become a symbol of German reunification: in December 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted televised performances of the symphony at West Berlin’s Philharmonie and East Berlin’s Schauspielhaus. The work’s Beethovenian residue is hinted at in the title, ‘dust’, which, according to Lachenmann’s programme note, is intended to signify an accumulated temporal deposit.72 Reverently approaching the Ninth as a quarry, the composer suggests that we stumble over the rubble of the expressive formulae that surround us, which become more or less unrecognizable components of a perception field. Hence largo cantilenas, pulsations and bare intervals are transformed for a listener who has overcome, but not forgotten, his or her Philharmonic attachment. Like Accanto, Staub uses decomposed gestures such as scalic figures, which are particularly evident in a passage starting at bar 282. These seem to have been important in Lachenmann’s conception of the score, since the sketches open with a range of such figures, some of which recall the four bars preceding the recapitulation of Beethoven’s first movement. Some specific allusions are to be found in the score, but these prompts are unlikely to be heard by an audience – even one familiar with the Ninth.

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At bars 194–6 a skeletal reference to the concluding phrase of Beethoven’s first subject is penned in beneath the percussion parts, as a way of showing the conductor, presumably, how this rhythm is to be picked out in the wind and percussion. Likewise, bars 203–4 contain a comparable reference to the ‘Ode to Joy’ theme, which is used to determine the rhythmic onsets, some of which are heard as string clusters, across the whole orchestra. Perhaps the initial point of orientation for an audience, during a live performance, is that (with the exception of some extra percussion) Staub uses Beethoven’s orchestra. Other signals include the prominent timpani part, perhaps suggestive of the Scherzo, the tonal chords that are occasionally to be heard emerging through gaps in the ensemble, and the use of sustained pedals and tremolandi, perhaps suggestive of Beethoven’s famous opening texture.73 Lachenmann’s extended techniques and non-pitched sounds undoubtedly make the symphonic gestures unfamiliar; presumably, this is what he means when he says that, in the context of the Beethoven, this is ‘Nicht-Musik’.74 Nevertheless, as befits a student of Nono, the composer is sensitive to the historical nature of the material deployed. Indeed, the score plays on a tension between tonal and symphonic allusions, on the one hand, being understood as dispersed traditional elements, and, on the other hand, being interpreted as sound objects because they are not organized in the conventional manner. However, the rubble moves in two directions, one might say: not only do we hear muffled resonances of Beethoven in Staub, but we also become attuned to the precursors of Lachenmann’s sound objects in Beethoven’s symphonic gestures. Lachenmann’s intervention jolts what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the prejudgement (Vorurteil) we bring to Beethoven. Because this music refutes a certain reception history of Beethoven, along with many of the values upon which the masterpiece culture is built, it is very much part of the ongoing debate about what Beethoven’s vision of human values offers to modern society. In Staub, the utopian dimension of the Ninth finds an outlet in the more modest aim of attenuating perception so that listeners become aware of the processes by which they attribute meaning to music. Speaking of his First String Quartet, Gran Torso (1972), Lachenmann refers to the problem caused by bringing his notion of the bodily energetic projection of sonority into contact with the established sound world of the string quartet. Unlike orchestral scores such as Air and Kontrakadenz, where he had been able to extend the range of instrumental and noninstrumental noises at his disposal, in Gran Torso ‘the received playing style itself had to be expanded, rendered alien’, generating a creative tension that resulted in greater precision.75 The same tension came into play in his much later Second Quartet, Reigen seliger Geister (Round Dance of Blessed

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Spirits, 1989), prompting the composer to speak of tones snatched from the air, and to conceive the ensemble as an imaginary super-instrument.76 An interesting feature of this quartet is that the score includes an unplayed line which the composer called ‘the basic rhythmic net (for the structure)’. When read alongside the score, this ‘time-net’ does indeed function as a rhythmic frame and gives some idea of Lachenmann’s compositional aims. The presence of this time-net, together with the explanation of its function in the section entitled ‘The Battered Time-Net’ from Lachenmann’s essay on the score, is significant because it offers some insight into a device that has maintained a shadowy existence in many of Lachenmann’s works from the 1970s and 1980s. Cavallotti notes the presence of time-nets in sketches for, among others, the following scores: temA, Air, Kontrakadenz, Tanzsuite, Mouvement and Ausklang.77 Lachenmann establishes that this net is a pre-compositional device offering ‘extremely aperiodic pulses’ and pitches ‘which owe themselves to easily traced 12-tone permutations’. He adds: ‘Musically, they [the pitches] play no role’,78 meaning it should not be assumed that a pitch from the time-net will control the corresponding section of the score. In addition, Lachenmann acknowledges that the net becomes battered because the rhythmic structure of the sonic events that are placed in it rips out its stitches. Such is the extent of this destruction in what Lachenmann calls a ‘hocket sequence’ that the net ceases to function, which is why from bar 280 the composer notates the cumulative rhythmic shape of the gestures, in a manner similar to the ‘polyphony of figures’ illustrated in Ex. 3.5. Another way of explaining what has happened here is that a device designed to control material has given way to an analytical tool designed to convey the actions of the material. From bar 344, where a waltz rhythm predominates, neither device is present in the score because, as Lachenmann understands the matter, ‘the internal rhythm has become the structural net’, which is a way of saying that the inner life of the material has prevailed.79

Music with images In his programme note on Tableau, for orchestra (1989), Lachenmann describes it as ‘a first step, always starting out afresh, in the search for forms of illusion-free communication’.80 In making this statement, it seems likely that Lachenmann was thinking of a first step on the path that was to lead to Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, in which illusion is a central topic. In the context of Tableau, what Lachenmann means by illusion relates back to the idea of the language-character of music, in that the score aims to present established musical conventions without the

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semantic legacy of their established meanings. He compares Tableau to a blocking rehearsal, suggesting that it moves sound archetypes around like stage sets, so as to enable a glance behind the curtains (into the corporeality of the sound object, so to speak).81 One such archetype occurs at bar 76, where an E minor string flautando chord suddenly looms out of the orchestral texture in a way reminiscent of the tape part in Accanto.82 Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern: Musik mit Bildern (1996) was commissioned by the Staatsoper Hamburg and was premiered there in 1997. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Little Match Girl’ had been on Lachenmann’s mind for a long time before he eventually composed the eponymous opera. Previously, he had used Andersen’s text in Les Consolations (1978), which incorporates the two earlier scores Consolation I (1967) and Consolation II (1968). The story was also in his thoughts in less direct contexts, as when, for instance, he compares the illusion of breadth created at the end of the Siciliano from Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied to the moment before the little girl’s imagined vision disappears when the match burns out.83 In addition, Lachenmann’s self-portrait of his progress as a composer, written for his debut at Donaueschingen with the premiere of Schwankungen am Rand in 1975, concludes by declaring an affinity with the little match girl of Andersen’s story.84 In 2001, Lachenmann continued the essay where it left off for the programme book of the Staatsoper Stuttgart, where he writes about his work since 1975, with particular attention to his new opera. What is notable about the updated version of this article is the extent to which the composer relates his opera to earlier scores in a manner that suggests the stage work amounts to a summation of his previous achievements, since by using techniques honed in earlier pieces it creates a network of intertextual dialogues.85 Andersen’s well-known tale can be summarized as follows. On a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve, a little girl tries, unsuccessfully, to sell matches. In an attempt to warm herself, she strikes her matches, with the result that the flames conjure up images of comfort and acceptance for her, such as a stove, a Christmas tree and, finally, her grandmother, in whose embrace she leaves behind earthly suffering. In the concluding image of the tale, the frozen corpse of the little girl is found on New Year’s Day. In addition to Andersen’s tale (1845), two other sources were used. One was a letter (1975) written by Gudrun Ensslin (who was a leading member of the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof gang) during her imprisonment in Stammheim, which is placed most obviously before the third match strike, though it is also heard in ‘Aus allen Fenstern’, which concludes Part 1. The other is a fragment by Leonardo da Vinci from the Codex Arundel (1339) that is inserted after

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the third match strike (which is associated with the illusion of the giant Christmas tree, followed by the image of a falling star); at this point, the text leaps from the cold of a Scandinavian winter to the volcanic southern Italy of Leonardo da Vinci’s text. Following these two insertions, the drama moves back to Andersen’s tale, and thus to the final match strike, in which the girl’s grandmother is summoned. Lachenmann is not unduly troubled by calling Das Mädchen an opera, perhaps because his track record is sufficient to dispel any expectation of conformity with operatic tradition. Nor is the work’s basic structure especially unconventional: the score divides into two parts: ‘Auf der Strasse’, which contains ten numbers, and ‘An der Hauswand’, which contains fourteen numbers.86 More unusually, however, much of the text is not set in a recognizable form, notwithstanding some passages in which it is recited. What customarily would be called the libretto comprises chunks of Andersen’s tale, together with the Ensslin and Leonardo insertions, alongside scene titles that generally pick up on key words from parts of the relevant source. No. 2 (‘In dieser Kälte’) and No. 3 (‘Frier-Arie’) provide good examples of the tendency to move away from word setting: using phonetic sounds of the type found in temA, the two sopranos convey the shivering and stuttering of the match girl. Perhaps the work’s most radical departure from established practice is that it does not represent the match girl by means of a vocal stage character, but instead embodies her presence in the musical fabric.87 Nevertheless, the score strongly associates the match girl with the two solo sopranos, who are located in the orchestra but nevertheless visible according to the composer’s spatial distribution of the instrumental forces. Despite Lachenmann sometimes being portrayed as a defender of outdated modernist ideas, the concept of embodiment practised by him in Das Mädchen is one that is in keeping with recent ideas on how traditional operas not only represent emotions, but also enact them. The difference in his case is that embodiment has become the principal medium, thereby pushing into focus the perceptual act that is required to invoke the character of the match girl from the sonic resources that constitute her. Again, Nos. 2 and 3 furnish good examples, since the shivering sopranos contribute to a larger sonic fabric that constitutes the match girl’s predicament. In this way, the evocation of shivering, even though it is not completely removed from more conventional modes of musical representation, nudges the audience to adopt the subject-position of the match girl by means of physical affinity. Furthermore, the notion of embodiment and its perception relates to what Lachenmann means by ‘music with images’ in the score’s subtitle. As David Metzer points out, ‘images’, as used by Lachenmann, is ‘an ambiguous term

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that encompasses mental pictures and particular sensations, such as the cold pervading the opera’.88 Because the drama is in the music, it does not require literal, realistic staged duplication, nor does it encourage a looser, multimedia idea of bringing music together with images so that the established associations of each medium interact with each other. Nevertheless, the music is more embedded in, and dependent on, a diverse semiotic network of sticky meanings and sensations than Lachenmann’s suggestion that ‘many things in the music are so manifest that they almost seem to obstruct any scenic images’ would denote, even if such connections are challenged in the process of being evoked.89 A persistent idea at work in this score, therefore, is one whereby music embodies images in a manner comparable to the way the little girl conjures up visions with her match strikes. The score not only draws on available image banks, it also draws on existing sound banks, which extend to Lachenmann’s own scores. ‘Aus allen Fenstern’ (No. 10), which concludes the first part of the opera, is a tour de force of referentiality, using six electronic soundtracks that include distorted shreds of Christmas carols, speech and music from radios. These audio sources are surrounded by towering orchestral textures which also contain their own allusions, with the most discernible references to carols being heard in the brass writing. The presence of the electronic soundtracks is reminiscent of the radios in Kontrakadenz, and even of the more extreme collages found in Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. In the context of Das Mädchen, however, the multimedia dimension becomes firmly associated with the idea of sounds drifting into the street from house windows: of domestic comfort being perceived as alien by a person who is excluded from its security. ‘Aus allen Fenstern’ also contains one of the few places in the score where the dramatic intention is openly stated: the predicament of the girl crouched in the corner is clearly conveyed by a recorded male speaker, who reads a section of Andersen’s text during clearings in the textures. This narrating voice stands in contrast to a recorded female voice reading Ensslin’s letter, a nuance that serves to strengthen links between the author of the letter and the match girl. In the middle of the scene (from bar 699), a succession of massive block chords is heard from a compendium of orchestral scores which include: the ‘Sacrificial Dance of the Chosen One’ from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Beethoven’s Coriolanus overture, the end of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra Op. 31, the beginning of Boulez’s Pli selon pli, the A minor closing chord of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, and the ff six-note chord from Berg’s Wozzeck.90 Although these chords are not easily recognized out of context, the tonal ones, especially the ones associated with Mahler, do stand in relief. Moreover, this selection of uprooted orchestral blows serves to indicate that

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instead of perceiving the match girl’s surroundings, we are now listening to her trauma, first because the references are now written only into the orchestral fabric instead of deriving from tape, and second because instead of signifying the comfortable lives of others, these chords punctuate vocal statements from the two sopranos of ‘ich’, articulating for the first time the anguished voice of the little girl. This perspective is also congruent with the circumstance that several of the scores to which Lachenmann alludes articulate the idea of the human subject overwhelmed by indifference. Das Mädchen’s great cry remains unheard, however, and we quickly return to the surroundings of sonic windows. At this point, words from the carol ‘Silent Night’ are written in the score (from bar 729), exerting a skeletal influence on the cumulative rhythm of the orchestral writing in a similar manner to the way in which the ‘Deutschlandlied’ was used in Tanzsuite. The structural use of these words is in keeping with a situation where the match girl’s isolation is far removed from comforting sentiments of the carol. It is not until the second part of the score, ‘An der Hauswand’, in ‘Ritsch 1’ (No. 12), that we hear the first of the match strikes. Each of these is described as a ‘Ritsch’, literally meaning a ‘rip’, a term used, presumably, for its onomatopoeic evocation of a match strike. This first match strike is preceded by utterances of ‘ich’, as previously heard in association with the orchestral blows, indicating that it is from the subjectposition of the girl that the illusions come into being. A Japanese temple gong (dobâchi) is rubbed to create the synaesthetic association of the warmth generated by a great iron stove, with brass feet and fittings, which is hallucinated by the bright flame of the little girl’s first match strike (Ex. 3.7). This bowl gong is placed visibly, so that rubbing it – an activity that literally warms the instrument – becomes part of the event; hence there is a clear link between the synaesthetic quality of the sound, which pulses like waves of heat, and the act of rubbing oneself to keep warm. Furthermore, this warmth is enhanced by the triadic sonorities emerging from the orchestra and chorus which pick up the overtones of the gong. The aura of the gong harks back to the deployment of the same instrument in Air, with the ‘stove’ music even quoting from the earlier score (starting from bar 231).91 Moreover, this intertextuality works in two directions, because not only does Air provide inspiration, it also acquires retrospectively a more concrete association with warmth. By alluding to Air (and Kontrakadenz, too, in ‘Aus allen Fenstern’), Lachenmann touches on one of the general themes in this book – how music interprets its past. Even though in this case it is the composer’s own compositional past that is reinterpreted, the strategy is still one whereby existing meanings are considered to be far from static.

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Ex. 3.7 Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, the Japanese temple gongs, preceded by vocal ‘ich’, from ‘Ritsch 1’ (No. 12), bars 98–102

In the following ‘Hauswand 2’ (No. 13), the girl is once more confronted with the house wall of her corner as the match is extinguished and the vision disappears. Sonically, this situation is achieved primarily through scraping polystyrene blocks against one another, creating a sound the composer describes as ‘the deaf rustling of packaging material’.92 (Again, there is a precedent for this now semantically enriched sound in Kontrakadenz.) Andersen’s second match strike, in which the house wall becomes transparent and the girl sees a roast goose, is omitted, its place being taken by the Ensslin material. The third match strike (No. 16), in which she views a Christmas tree (through the house wall) duly takes place. Because the painted figures on the tree remind the girl of shop windows, Lachenmann follows the appearance of the tree with a section entitled ‘Kaufladen’ (No. 17), in which the combination of trilled strings plus great gushes on harps, vibraphones and pianos produce textures redolent of Boulez’s Répons. As the Christmas lights climb higher and higher (No. 18), they instigate the image of the shooting star (No. 19)

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that takes the drama to the Leonardo material (No. 20), which will be discussed shortly. The Leonardo material leads to ‘Hauswand 4’ (No. 21), in which the unconducted orchestra reassembles both itself and the freezing street for the fourth match strike (No. 22), in which the girl brings forth the image of her grandmother. Just looking at the amount of wiping and swiping notated in the score is enough to invoke the idea of a match strike, without seeing the resulting actions or hearing the resulting glissandi. Lachenmann also finds a vocabulary to describe his orchestration at this point, talking of a rip on the tuning keys of the two pianos (achieved by means of ‘kiddycraft’ potties), and a crackling pizzicato arpeggio, performed with a plectrum behind the bridge on the string instruments.93 Sure enough, the grandmother appears (No. 23), in massive textures topped by the warmth of the two sopranos. The use of two high soprano lines that wind around each other is reminiscent of the vocal writing in Nono’s Prometeo and of comparable scoring in a variety of works by Rihm that are themselves influenced by Prometeo, such as Die Eroberung von Mexico. In response to the words ‘the grandmother had never appeared beautiful nor so tall before’, Lachenmann creates what he calls a quasi-pedal unison line, which looms through the orchestra.94 In an effort to ensure that the loving vision of her grandmother does not vanish when the match goes out, like the other images, the girl proceeds to light the whole box (No. 24). Unsurprisingly, Lachenmann does not let this final burst of flames go unnoticed, marking it in a blaze of tam-tam strokes and homophonic brass writing. The little girl implores her grandmother to take her with her – a request that is conveyed by means of reasonably conventional word setting for the sopranos, with the prominence of the word ‘ich’ again indicating that it is the girl’s voice we are hearing. Her wish is granted: in the following ‘Himmelfahrt’ (No. 25), she does indeed ascend to heaven in the arms of her grandmother by means of a musically climbing lift. It is at this point in the story that Andersen writes: ‘she was with God’. And it is at this point in the opera (No. 26) that one of the most evocative sounds in the score emerges, that of the shô, a Japanese mouth organ that is a ritual instrument of the gagaku music. Although Andersen’s words border on just the sort of kitsch that Lachenmann normally refuses to contemplate, the composer takes seriously the idea of transcendence, even if it is without consolation or sentimentality, which he links to what he calls the shô’s ‘silvery transported sound’.95 Nonnenman suggests that ‘the shô section also seems indebted to the philosophy of the non-ego, as Lachenmann encountered it during the mid-1980s among the Japanese philosophers of the Kyoto School, in particular Kitarō Nishida’.96 Certainly, the music

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invokes a sense of stillness that is akin to a calming of the ego, and even to a state of non-being. In addition, the fact that Lachenmann has some knowledge of Japanese culture makes it more plausible to understand this scene as one in which the mystery of transcendence is invoked by turning to the Far East than to interpret it in simple orientalist terms. In order to let the delicate voice of the shô speak, the orchestration is necessarily sparse, using quiet, metallic sonorities to sustain the sound of the instrument. As the shô becomes less prominent in the texture, col legno wiping sounds in the strings take over, and a slow, rhythmic pattern at the top of the pianos emerges, which is to last until the end of the score. In the final ‘Epilog’ (No. 27), the col legno textures from the previous scene continue, while the sounds of brass players blowing air through their instruments add to the general bleakness near the end. The piano rhythm, which, as Kaltenecker observes, initially resembles a sarabande, is exchanged between the two instruments standing on either side of the stage.97 It uses exactly the same pitches, the top two of the keyboard, as the Morse-code-like siciliano piano rhythm in Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied and as the right-hand ‘gigue’ rhythm in ‘Schattentanz’ from Ein Kinderspiel. This time, though, the compound dance rhythm, estranged through register and lack of pitch contour, takes place at a slower tempo, as what Lachenmann calls a ‘ghost melody’ becomes associated with the lifeless form of the match girl.98 This scene marks the end of Andersen’s story: in contrast to the consolation of transcendence, the frozen corpse of the match girl is found on New Year’s Day; somewhat grotesquely, she still has a smile on her lips from the embrace of her grandmother. Lachenmann’s lifeless dance conveys an expressionless social indifference, perhaps suggesting that the perception of that indifference is a first step towards correcting it. Like so many female operatic protagonists, the match girl dies, and yet this time her death is not a form of intoxication, and this time we are not asked to believe that it transports us beyond social coldness. This ending resonates most tellingly not with operatic models, but instead with those Schubertian outsider perspectives in which the interior of the bourgeois household is set against the exterior of the street. Nowhere is this dichotomy more acute than in the final song of Die Winterreise, where the image of the bare-footed organ grinder standing on the ice offers a precursor for Lachenmann’s vision of exclusion. Both scores end with empty repetitive piano figures. What is certain is that the notion of the convicted terrorist Gudrun Ensslin as a doppelgänger for the match girl does not sit comfortably with the conventions of bourgeois opera.99 (Ensslin was the girl with the matches in the rather literal sense that in 1968 she participated in an arson attack

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on two Frankfurt department stores.) The insertion of her letter in the score brings a personal element to the composition since Lachenmann knew Ensslin as a child, because his father, like hers, was a Protestant pastor.100 Subsequently, he took a keen interest in publications relating to her activities and consequent imprisonment in Stammheim.101 It is as if Lachenmann’s Lutheran background and his critique of bourgeois values met, awkwardly, in the figure of Ensslin: as if he saw in her someone who embodied principles similar to his own, and yet who turned them into something monstrous. In ‘Hauswand 3’ (No. 14), Ensslin’s words are enunciated by an orchestral and vocal whisper chorus, while her final line ‘write on our skin’ is enacted in rhythmic ‘writing’, especially on the skins of drums (No. 15). Lachenmann does not hesitate to draw a parallel between Ensslin and the topic of the opera, finding in her an ‘extremely distorted variant of my Mädchen’.102 He makes the comparison because in Ensslin’s letter he detects not simply the ‘unbridled readiness for violence and the mental breakdown, but also her love for the individual broken by society’.103 The two figures are also connected by the topic of social coldness: the match girl is the victim of social coldness, while Ensslin’s recognition of the latter led her to turn this coldness remorselessly back onto society.104 More generally, it is possible that the context of the student protests from 1968, with which Ensslin was associated (albeit in an extreme way), is brought back by revisiting ideas from scores such as temA, Kontrakadenz and Air that were linked to this time. Lachenmann describes the inserted ‘Leonardo’ section (No. 20) as follows: ‘a further and pivotal “hallucination” – the forces of nature as an expression of the burning human desire for knowledge and a glance into the awe- and yearning-inspiring cave – now complemented the little girl’s vision of warmth and carried them on to renewed coldness’.105 It is instructive to know that the composer understands this passage in terms of another ‘hallucination’, since the idea is consistent with the ‘music with images’ concept, even if Leonardo’s vision exceeds anything attempted in Andersen’s match strikes. The background to this segment is also intricate, since it relates to ‘ . . . Zwei Gefühle . . . ’, Musik mit Leonardo for speakers and ensemble (1992), an earlier score that is based on two passages by Leonardo da Vinci which, as suggested in Lachenmann’s above comment, refer respectively to natural forces and to the experience of standing before a cave. Leonardo observed natural forces at work on the coastline of Sicily, by surveying the turbulent Straits of Messina and the volcanic island of Stromboli. Following that encounter, he stood at the entrance to a large cave, where he experienced

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simultaneously the two emotions (‘zwei Gefühle’) of fear and desire: ‘a fear of the threatening darkness of the cavern, but a desire to see with my own eyes what might be miraculous within it’.106 In Lachenmann’s setting, Leonardo’s text is distributed between two speakers, and it is broken down into cells so that the speakers become what the composer terms ‘phonetically music-making instrumentalists’ of the type already encountered in Salut für Caudwell. The intention is that the text should be comprehensible – at least for the listener who is willing to become what Lachenmann calls an ‘acoustically perceptive reader or decoder’.107 Lachenmann informs us that a large part of the piece was written in Nono’s empty house in Sardinia, and he describes it as ‘a “pastoral” written when thinking about what had linked me to the composer of Hay que caminar’.108 The most obvious way of interpreting this remark is through the themes of wandering and searching that are central to both scores. Significantly, the programme note was written in 1994, a couple of years after the score was completed, when Lachenmann would have been immersed in writing Das Mädchen. Indeed, when Lachenmann offers the view that structurally directed listening – the perception of immediate sounds and their interconnections – is inseparable from inner images and sensations, he might almost be writing about the opera.109 Central to both scores is the idea that, because the images are in the music, they do not function as a separate dimension. Initially, the ‘Leonardo’ section of Das Mädchen was a modified version of ‘ . . . Zwei Gefühle . . . ’, Musik mit Leonardo, but for the 2000 Tokyo version of the score Lachenmann reduced this music to five fermatas, over which Leonardo’s text is rhythmically declaimed by one speaker instead of two. Lachenmann likens this sequence of pauses to moments for reflection on a hike, and suggests that they resonate with comparable instants in the drama such as the sustained A♭ with which the score opens, and the open spaces of ‘Hauswand 3’ (No. 14) and ‘Shô’ (No. 26).110 Anyway, he has remained committed to this modification – to the extent that he performed the text himself on the recording by the South-West Radio Symphony Orchestra. His willingness to take on this role gives a strong indication, beyond the shared idea of inner images, of why Lachenmann inserted this material. He wanted to include a portrait of himself in such a summative score, partly to identify himself with the subject matter of the opera and partly to embody as a creative act his own way of negotiating between the desire for knowledge and the fear of the unknown. A literal match strike is congruent with the notion of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ because it meets the requirement that action and outcome are directly linked, taking this connection to what might be called a

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multisensual level because it appeals to sight, sound, touch, smell and possibly taste (one can taste the sulphur in the air). Likewise, the attention to the production of sound in the scored match strikes draws us into the mechanism by which the intersection of sound and image comes into being. Yet there is a sense in which these moments are somewhat at odds with this action-based way of thinking, because they function more as shimmering illusions of phantasmagoria, bringing to mind Adorno’s critique of the fire music from Die Walküre, which he likens to a commodity form.111 Or put in different terms, the apparent fusion of music and image does not necessarily attract attention to how the sound is produced. In addition, this conflict plays out at other dramatic levels: the switches between cold and warmth that are central to the alternating sequence of ‘house wall’ scenes and match strikes are also switches between reality and illusion. On the one hand, therefore, the music strenuously exposes the mechanisms of phantasmagoria – the gap between concrete means and aural appearance – while on the other hand, the music pins its hopes on a glimpse of something beyond indifference to virtuosic moments of illusion. The programme book for the Stuttgart performance of Das Mädchen opens with a quotation from Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘One-Way Street’ (the first half of the opera is entitled ‘On the Street’), which reads as follows: ‘Warmth is ebbing from things. The objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of secret resistances – not only the overt ones – that they put in our way, we have an immense labour to perform.’112 Lachenmann’s reason for choosing to include this passage in the programme is not hard to fathom: the composition, the performance and the reception of Das Mädchen are part of the labour required to staunch the flow of warmth from things.

Perspectives Lachenmann is keen to tell the story of new music in Germany, especially in relation to Darmstadt, and what is more, to tell it in a way that asserts his own place in relation to the central preoccupations of this history. In trying to construct a trajectory for his own activities, and in offering typically forthright opinions in the process, he has a tendency to combine (sometimes repetitively) historiography with explanations of his own techniques. His perspective with regard to the 1950s is typically complicated, for he is anxious to distance himself from the serialist emphasis on form over sound and from the concomitant preoccupation with internal relations over aesthetic context. Yet his critique amounts not to a negation of serial principles, but to an expansion of them, so that the principle of organization

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becomes enriched. The term he coined, in 1990, for this way of simultaneously continuing and breaking with the past is ‘dialectical structuralism’, as a way of conveying a structural approach that engages with the social content of the material.113 A crucial part of this dialogue with the 1950s refers to the idea that ‘music abandoned its attempts to be a language and came out in its true colours as a non-linguistic structure’.114 Accordingly, Lachenmann declares his allegiance to a number of key scores from the ‘classical’ period of what he calls structuralism. Although there is some variety between different essays, Nono’s Canto sospeso, Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître and Stockhausen’s Gruppen tend to be core components, while the essay ‘Affekt und Aspekt’ (1982) adds to the list Berio’s Epifania and Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra.115 Lachenmann draws a clear line between the figures associated with the 1950s and what he calls the ‘second generation’ that is represented by the work of composers such as Ligeti, Penderecki, Kagel, Schnebel and Berio in the 1960s, even though he gives this group some credit for trying to break away from the restrictions of serialism.116 Writing in 1987, he comments: Characteristic works of that period such as Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Aventures, Kagel’s Sonant and Sur Scène, Schnebel’s glossolalie and réactions, struck me, despite my great admiration for them, as also being products of a narcissistically coquettish pseudo-radicalism, as ways of shocking or enthralling the bourgeoisie.117

Even though this remark disguises Lachenmann’s level of interest in the scores mentioned, it is consistent with the fact that he absorbed these influences in a distinctive manner. If Lachenmann’s response to the 1960s was mixed, it was far less ambiguous with regard to the 1970s, which he calls a period of stagnation, arguing that this was the decade in which the major figures such as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Kagel and Xenakis ran out of steam. He detects a manipulative element in Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen, which, as mentioned earlier, like Air was premiered in 1969. Building on this critique, he adds: ‘The things that seemed to me to be characteristic of this stagnation included all the revamped variants of happenings, performances, improvisations and environments.’118 There was, however, worse to come, for after stagnation came regression: what he calls a return to ‘philharmonic-symphonic indulgences’, which claim to give ‘expression to human emotions and aspirations by using off-the-shelf products from the supermarket of tradition’.119 He also talks of ‘the escape of the crippled subject into a new world of explicit affect’,

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which, however, becomes an ‘old domestic junk-room of instant affects’. More colourfully, he adds: ‘this flood of powerfully affective music might be the fruit of putrefaction, where worms writhe voraciously in the guts of tonality’s corpse’.120 The argument beneath this dismissal of neo-Romanticism is that, by moving away from the language-character of music, Lachenmann’s generation worked within the limitations imposed by having a reduced form of subjectivity at its disposal. The generation of the ‘affect’ composers, by contrast, failed to recognize these constraints, and consequently wanted subjectivity restored to the fullness of the bourgeois era. In making this claim, Lachenmann interprets the neo-Romantic movement very much within the framework of Darmstadt, arguing that its gesture could not be continuously repeated because it was predicated on rejecting a particular set of values. Moreover, he maintains that Wolfgang Rihm, ‘the composer who’, in his opinion, ‘most consciously reflected this lack of questioning’, sensed this dilemma.121 Leaving aside the paradox that if Rihm sensed the dilemma he could not have been entirely unquestioning, this comment is interesting because it mixes historical interpretation with personal impression, since Lachenmann became acquainted with Rihm in 1982 (the year that marks a turn in Rihm’s career, with the initiation of the Chiffre series) when they were both tutors at the Darmstadt summer course. The overt tonal references of Rihm’s Third String Quartet, which like Accanto dates from 1976, provides an example of the sort of music that Lachenmann considers to offer an impaired form of subjectivity. What his judgement misses, however, is that Rihm’s score also represents a response to the problem of music’s ‘language-character’, in this case using semiotic reconfiguration as a way of turning apparently stable meanings into something new. The other compositional movement, or strand, from the 1980s that Lachenmann discusses is what he calls ‘structural mannerism’, and it is clear that he means by this what is otherwise known as ‘the new complexity’. This is a movement that is principally associated with Brian Ferneyhough (who also taught at the Darmstadt summer course in 1982), but Lachenmann deflects his critique from this composer by indicating that Ferneyhough ‘re-transcends structuralist techniques’. The structural mannerists, Lachenmann maintains (in an argument that is closely related to his critique of 1950s-style serialism), ‘cling to the false belief that they can take as their point of departure an approach to their material which is entirely untouched – indeed innocent – of any historical or social influences’, using a ‘regulated interplay of parameters determined purely by acoustic considerations’.122

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Although the ‘affect composers’ and the ‘structural mannerists’ appear to offer diametrically opposed positions, Lachenmann contends, dialectically, that the tendencies are ‘merely two sides of the same coin’ because they are accepting of each other and of the social norm.123 This argument is a little too convenient because, despite Lachenmann’s allowance for Ferneyhough, it underestimates the extent to which the new complexity might also be a way of refusing habit and it underplays the continued modernist dimension in Rihm’s music, at least. Lachenmann’s perspective is also somewhat wide of the mark in linking the ‘affect’ composers to the 1980s, given that this tendency was most evident in the 1970s, as Lachenmann would have known because he was on the jury that awarded Rihm the Kranichstein prize for Musik für drei Streicher in 1978. Although it is true that Rihm was a major presence at the Darmstadt summer courses during the 1980s, his style changed significantly during this decade, partly under the influence of Nono’s music from this time. In a later article, Lachenmann refines his point about structural mannerism somewhat by arguing that compositions using complex, sometimes algorithmically generated forms tend to pay the price of ‘a restricted sonic panorama, where precisely that which is quantifiable is developed or permuted’, in comparison with compositions which take sound-invention as their point of departure.124 Lachenmann said little about Nono’s music from the 1980s until the tribute that he wrote after his former teacher’s death. In this essay, he comments of the fermatas from the late works (which Rihm found so compelling) that they open up remembrance, reflection and selfdiscovery.125 Despite this affinity, Nono’s scores from the 1980s did not exert the same influence on Lachenmann as those from the 1950s. If Lachenmann’s dismissive remarks about developments in the 1980s do not apply to Nono, it seems likely that they do extend to spectralism, which he would have experienced at the Darmstadt summer courses. In a fleeting discussion of the topic, he expresses admiration for Grisey, but conveys a more general concern about seeking a magical certainty in harmonic spectra.126 Lachenmann’s dispute with Henze was discussed in Chapter 2, but it is worth mentioning again that he deemed Henze to be a ‘confirmed believer’ in the younger generation and applied his critique of neo-Romanticism to the older figure, repeating the passage quoted above about decaying tonality from the essay ‘Affekt und Aspekt’.127 At the time of their composition, Lachenmann associated temA, Pression and Air with the idea of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’. Slightly later (1973), however, he makes a claim to a social-aesthetic breakthrough in these scores in rather different, if congruous, terms when he writes of

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‘the offer of beauty not just through the refusal of habit but through exposing the conditions of accepted beauty’.128 Clearly influenced by what he saw as the problem of the return of the bourgeois concept of beauty in the 1970s, this position became a central part of Lachenmann’s aesthetic. It is related to what he later describes as ‘experiencing the familiar in an unfamiliar context, mobilising, re-launching perception and making it perceptible as an experience’.129 Later in his career, Lachenmann talks less of the ‘refusal of habit’, as the concept starts to feed into a more general sense of what he calls ‘breaking the magic’, a phrase he uses not only in relation to bourgeois culture, but also in connection with the entertainment industry. The wording is particularly associated with Lachenmann’s thinking in the new millennium, even though, as Ulrich Mosch points out, there is a longer genealogy of the term ‘magic’ in Lachenmann’s writings.130 Lachenmann defines it as follows: ‘To break the magic in music means to interrupt, or rather to suspend its irrational power by intervening in the sounding structure of the magical object.’ Later he comments: ‘this is the quandary: magic as a medium of familiar safety, even of collective ecstasy, or magic as a medium of reflection’.131 In other words, ‘breaking the magic’ is a way of understanding the way in which Accanto subverts the expectations associated with Mozart. In recent years, Lachenmann’s notion of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ has also changed incrementally. He comments: My idea of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ is not at all just about the noises, it’s about the physical energy of sound. And this aspect of energy can be communicated by, let’s say, a totally normal pizzicato on a violin, or a unison; two instruments playing the same note, but with a slight difference in vibrations.

He adds, ‘the idea of energy remains the most important thing for me’. He makes this remark in relation to his Concertini (2005), which he says ‘was another attempt to reintegrate pitch contol into my sound attempts’.132 The upshot of this statement is that Lachenmann’s focus has moved away from a preoccupation with noise to a concern with the energy of sounds, whether or not these are pitched or even contain tonal elements. He is now concerned less with referring to pre-existing music than with conveying traditional elements by means of the energy of sound production. This tendency is evident in his Third String Quartet, Grido (2002), in which there are plenty of conventional pitches. The notion of the word ‘aura’ in Lachenmann’s aesthetics, which he describes in terms of ‘archetypal magical predeterminations’, is clearly influenced by Benjamin’s use of the term to describe the sense of distance

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created by autonomous art, even if Benjamin’s concept corresponds to a mixture of what Lachenmann calls tradition and aura.133 Lachenmann seeks to break the authority of aesthetic distance not by means of a new technology, but by combining an emphasis on the mechanisms for producing sounds, so that the music does not appear to be ‘natural’, with a persistence in revealing the old assumptions. Another way of describing this focus on the production of sound is to relate it to what Roland Barthes describes as the ‘grain of the voice’, as a way of drawing attention to the physical generation of the sound rather than the beauty of tone. Indeed, Barthes formulated the idea partly in response to perceiving the absence of this dimension in the performance style of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau; and it is entirely possible that the same voice informed Lachenmann’s polemics against the traditional concept of beauty of tone.134 Unlike the theorization by Peter Bürger, in which the avant-garde seeks to dismantle bourgeois aesthetics by collapsing art into life, Lachenmann aims not to destroy bourgeois art, but to release its critical potential by breaking free of accumulated customs.135 The sentiment is close to the following one from Adorno’s essay ‘On Tradition’: ‘Only that which inexorably denies tradition may once again retrieve it.’136 The dialectical tension generated by the concept of music that has shed its language-character but wants to remain true to the past is also engaged when Lachenmann says that he chose his teacher because ‘Nono was the only one whose path consciously involved tradition, as redefined by him’.137 Since a number of parallels have been drawn between Adorno’s aesthetics and Lachenmann’s approach to composition, it is worth noting that the two figures would have met at the Darmstadt summer courses (Adorno was present the year of Lachenmann’s first visit in 1957, and both men attended in 1965 and 1966). Although Lachenmann is keen in his exchange with Henze to assert that he does not belong to what he calls ‘Adorno’s School’,138 he is undoubtedly familiar with Adorno’s thinking. Rather than attempting to embody Adorno’s ideas in his compositions, it seems more likely that Lachenmann absorbed his central aesthetic tenets and then experienced them through his own encounters with musical material. The obsolescence of material is one Adornian idea to which Lachenmann does seem to subscribe, an obsolescence that comes about in Adorno’s view partly as a result of compositional advances and partly as a result of new taboos on the older positivities. In a discussion of this aspect of Adorno’s artistic material, Fredric Jameson comments, in a remark that could have been made directly in relation to Lachenmann: ‘the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel the force,

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in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation’.139 Lachenmann’s critique of an obsession with structural connection also resembles Adorno’s critique of objectifying tendencies. Indeed, even though Lachenmann indicates that Adorno’s ‘The Ageing of the New Music’ was unfair to those it attacked, he concurs with the view that the post-war avant-garde betrayed the concept of beauty associated with the Second Viennese School.140 Furthermore, Lachenmann is close to the Adornian idea that music is autonomous in the sense that it responds to the demands of the material, and yet it is also socially mediated because the material engages socially derived tensions. Nevertheless, he adds a specific flavour to this dialectic by placing far more emphasis than envisaged by Adorno on the physical quality of sounds. Thus, as Albrecht Wellmer indicates, there is a certain ambiguity in the idea of ‘music as existential experience’ because, on the one hand, it conveys the embodied perception of material while, on the other hand, it refers to the perception of material as the bearer of aura.141 This ambiguity is not, however, simply the result of an oversight on the composer’s part, but rather an indication of Lachenmann’s willingness to engage with inconsistencies in the condition of musical material. Lachenmann remains loyal to a model of subjectivity based on interiority: a world-shaping consciousness that is capable of unmasking the false wholeness of the bourgeois subject. Thus he speaks in terms of essence and appearance (or false consciousness), and of authenticity and inauthenticity. In other words, he views the subject as a producer of meanings – a model that has been persistently criticized by post-structuralist approaches, which instead consider the subject to be the result of meanings, and hence itself produced by an intersection of discourses. Even so, Lachenmann resists neat categories because he lays significant emphasis also on the idea of intensity – a mode of experience that does not sit easily with the notion of a centred subject. In an interview, he comments: ‘To me, as important as beauty is the word intensity. I search for this in music.’142 This is appropriate terminology because it is indeed possible to hear Lachenmann’s music not so much in terms of a refusal of habit as generating fields of intensity that threaten to disperse a connecting subjectivity. The effect is well described when Deleuze and Guattari talk of ‘bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds and gradients’,143 even though it is not necessary to follow them in associating these experiences so strongly with schizophrenia. Lachenmann’s efforts to engage processes of perception do not adhere to one model of subjectivity; instead, they offer a range of experiences that may well meander from a focus on the defiance of convention to a less centred

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immersion in a variety of intensities. As already mentioned in connection with the Tanzsuite, the idea of a structural net becoming torn is one that has affinities with the tenets of post-structuralism. Among the various discourses of post-structuralism, Lachenmann’s music finds common cause with deconstruction in particular for several reasons. It discovers hidden sediments in existing materials, and it uses these to loosen established patterns of signification. It cherishes those elements, such as the production of sound, that are normally suppressed to create the illusion of smoothness. And it makes transitions the focus of attention instead of treating them as joins that are to be covered by skilful writing. Unlike deconstruction, however, Lachenmann’s approach does not emphasize a continuous deferral of meaning, because it seeks to unearth a buried authenticity. Lachenmann extends his critique of formalist composition to the latter’s attempts to marginalize the aesthetic dimension, as demonstrated when he argues in relation to Boulez that the idea of prioritizing technique over aesthetics involves a secret dialectic with the excluded dimension.144 He might have added, however, that Boulez himself eventually reached a similar conclusion. In deference to that hidden dialectic, Lachenmann’s music is deliberately embedded in words, concepts and discourses. As a result, it is not just the case that this music gains from an understanding of its aesthetic context, but that it enacts an aesthetic practice that makes text and context inseparable. Lachenmann is, therefore, something of a paradox, because, even though his notion of ideology critique is somewhat out of fashion, his insistence that music is embedded in ideas and institutions is in keeping with recent approaches to music. Accordingly, it is principally in this second capacity that the importance of Lachenmann’s aesthetic practice lies, whether or not one agrees with his critique of social ideology, due to its sheer insistence on this embedded quality. Lachenmann demonstrates clearly that when we engage with music, whether through composition, performance or reception, we engage with a range of opinions, practices and assumptions, whether these are our own or operate at an institutional level. His music tells us this in an embodied and intellectual sense, thereby creating opportunities to reconsider established responses.

4 Music and signs: Wolfgang Rihm

I plead for an unfathomable, clear, confused and passionate music, music that is precise and astonished, like human existence.1

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Born in 1952, Rihm was recognized as a gifted composer at an early stage: in 1968 he was able during school hours to attend Eugen Werner Velte’s classes at the Karlsruhe Music Academy. On completing school in 1972, Rihm went to study with Stockhausen for a year in Cologne, having encountered him at the Darmstadt summer courses, which he first attended in 1970. From 1973 to 1976 – years in which he was emerging as a significant talent – he received tuition from the Swiss composer Klaus Huber in Freiburg im Breisgau. Rihm suggests that Velte helped him to develop analytical skills, that Stockhausen taught him to value intuition, and that Huber enhanced his powers of philosophical reflection.2 Rihm’s scores from the 1970s are saturated with historical memory, and it was this trait that brought the 22-year-old composer to prominence at the 1974 Donaueschinger Musiktage, with his Morphonie, Sektor IV (1973), for string quartet and orchestra. At an event rooted in the structural obsessions of the post-war generation, it was something of a shock for the audience to encounter from a pupil of Stockhausen such an openly expressionist score (despite the constructionist connotations of the score’s title) that even concludes with a Mahlerian Abgesang. This audience was confronted not only by the physicality of Rihm’s music, but also by the level of awareness demonstrated by his accompanying programme note. With his eyes wide open, and perhaps enacting the mirror image of this programme note’s title (‘In den Spiegel gelauscht . . . ’), Rihm wrote: ‘Music must be full of emotion, and the emotion full of complexity.’3 This bon mot is disarming not because it breaks modernist taboos, but because it cleverly entangles structural and emotional complexity in a way that dismantles a sense of inherent contradiction between the two poles. Within the next four years, Rihm was to exemplify this perspective in commissions such as the Third String Quartet, Musik für drei Streicher and the chamber opera Jakob Lenz, pieces that immediately established him as one of the leading figures of his generation. They also positioned him, in

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contrast to some of his precursors, as a composer willing to open a dialogue with the traditional genres of bourgeois music.

Orchestral music Within the orchestral sphere, Morphonie heralded the extreme late- and post-Romantic textures that were to become elaborated in subsequent scores such as Dis-Kontur (1974) and Sub-Kontur (1975), both of which call for a very large orchestra. In an apt description of these pieces, Josef Häusler wrote of ‘massive accumulations of energy which clash and explode’.4 Dedicated to Klaus Huber, who was teaching Rihm at the time, Dis-Kontur opens with huge hammer blows, signifying gesturally the Finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which intersect with the timpani and bass drums to form substantial tremors. However, the pulsations are not without form since they deploy a proportional scheme (5:7:2:9) that is encountered in the silent beats between the opening hammer blows, and that extends to groupings of bars and larger expanses.5 After this tumultuous opening, the score proceeds to unfold as an appropriately discontoured march, punctuated by pauses that resonate with the corporality of the music. Perhaps the closest analogy to this sound world is that of Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces Op. 6, the third of which is, of course, a march. In terms that are of general importance for his aesthetic, Rihm describes two intertwined contours in this piece: one is the raw state that is conveyed by the hammer blows, the other is the cipher of the march, a historically developed form that is here encountered in ruins.6 Rihm speaks of Sub-Kontur, which premiered at Donaueschingen in 1976, in comparable terms to its sibling, commenting that a melodic adagio, as a cipher of an existing type of musical language, climbs up from under, through the omnipresent attacks of a musical raw state.7 When this partly hidden stratum is related to the idea of a sub-contour embodied in the score’s title, it functions as a signifying layer that breaks through to the surface of the music. Such moments occur with particular force in the Mahlerian outbursts of the principal theme in the ‘Exposition’ at bar 81 (see Ex. 4.1) and the ‘Recapitulation’ at bar 272. The raw state is encountered, in ways comparable to its companion score, by means of percussion blows – minus hammer – and by means of deep textures offset by very high violin writing. Certainly, the orchestration emphasizes low instruments: it includes two tubas and specifies a woodwind section consisting only of contrabassoons. A range of shaping forces overlap in Sub-Kontur: these include the outline of a sonata form and a tempo scheme, linked to ratios of proportion

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Ex. 4.1 Wolfgang Rihm, Sub-Kontur, bars 81–2

and duration, that facilitates a gradual acceleration – notwithstanding a return to adagio for the principal theme’s reprise – through most of the score.8 This approach to form hints that Stockhausen, to whom Sub-Kontur is dedicated, exerted an influence on this score. Indeed Wolf Frobenius indicates that in conversation Rihm not only acknowledged his admiration for Stockhausen’s sense of proportion and duration, but also indicated that two of his teacher’s pieces particularly influenced Sub-Kontur.9 Inori (1974) offered sonic resources – Frobenius gives examples of melodic similarities between Sub-Kontur and the opening (Japanese) theme of Inori – and Momente (1964) affected the organization of events. The latter is of course known for its use of moment-form: events that are not dependent on a cumulative structure for their individual presence. Interestingly, Rihm comments that when he was in Stockhausen’s class, it studied Momente, and its members attended the rehearsals and premiere of a new version of the score.10 Although Rihm chooses to explore the idea of moments in a less restricted manner than Stockhausen envisaged, the notion of multivalent sound objects that occupy their own space is important for understanding how events interact with one another in Sub-Kontur – and in much of Rihm’s other music. In addition, it may well be that the manipulation of recorded sound objects found in Stockhausen’s Hymnen (1967) is significant for Rihm’s manipulation of references in his compositional approach. When modernist and Romantic references occur alongside atavistic gestures in Sub-Kontur and Dis-Kontur, the results are aesthetically complex because the interweaving contours of these strands serve to jolt pre-established codes. Dis-Kontur’s hammer is an unusual requirement, but bass drums feature extensively in Rihm’s earlier music, providing it with a

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visceral directness that threatens to overwhelm historical reflection. At the same time, distorted semiotic references to the European tradition also abound in the same repertoire. It is the interplay of these two not-easily reconciled impulses that unleashes an unstable dynamic force in the music. A little later, these preoccupations assume huge proportions in the expansive Third Symphony (1977), for soprano, baritone, choir and orchestra. The first movement alone is a four-part adagio for orchestra; the second is also an adagio, scored for the two soloists, choir and orchestra, that sets texts by Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Rimbaud; the third is another orchestral adagio; and the short fourth movement, for choir and orchestra, also adopts a slow tempo and sets another Nietzsche text. The Nietzsche poems used in this symphony, ‘Der Einsamste’ (‘The Loneliest One’) and ‘Das eherne Schweigen’ (‘Brazen Silence’), express uncertainty and resignation. ‘Der Einsamste’, with its late-in-the-day questions and doubts, opens and closes the second movement, with the two soloists moving homophonically against block-like harmonies. A setting of ‘Das eherne Schweigen’, with its comparable topic of unanswered questions and silence, comprises the whole compact fourth movement, where the choir and soloists create chorale-like textures. These two fragments also reappear in the slightly later Zweite Abgesangsszene (1979), and in Umhergetrieben, aufgewirbelt (Wandering, Swirled Up, 1981), for mezzo-soprano, baritone, mixed choir and flutes. In addition, a spare setting of ‘Der Einsamste’ opens Sechs Gedichte von Friedrich Nietzsche (2001), for baritone and piano. The extent to which the five Abgesangsszenen (Farewell Scenes, 1980) reflect on and develop the atmosphere of the Third Symphony is a good indicator of Rihm’s willingness to respond to a previous score in subsequent music. Although each Abgesangsszene functions as a separate piece, the fifth, at least in its revised version, was designed to conclude the complete cycle, as Rihm calls it on the final page. The first piece is entirely orchestral, and so was the fifth before Rihm revised it by adding a duet, another Nietzsche setting, at the end for the mezzo-soprano and baritone soloists, in order to conclude the cycle. The three inner pieces are, respectively, vocal settings of Nietzsche and Novalis (mezzo-soprano), Peter Huchel (baritone) and Nietzsche (mezzo-soprano) again. The Nietzsche fragments that Rihm deploys in the Third Symphony occur as the first and fourth songs of the Zweite Abgesangsszene; in both cases, they are set as expressionistic lines that move against the orchestral textures, turning away from the contemplative mood they generated in the earlier score. The Novalis setting constitutes the one-line fifth song, while the second and third songs are also settings of Nietzsche fragments, of a suitably valedictory nature, taken from a variety of poems. Writing of the

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Zweite Abgesangsszene, Rihm comments that it is a mixture of orchestral song, opera scene and symphonic movement. Arguably, this combination does not extend far beyond the experiments in this genre of Berlioz and Mahler. What is significant about Rihm’s contribution, however, is that it triggers and mutates nineteenth-century genre expectations at the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, it is not only classical form that is blurred in this score, so is classical tonality: Rihm suggests that the central chord could be heard as simultaneously E major, A♭ major and A♭ minor, adding that even though it is explicable in terms of traditional harmony, it is by no means based in this framework.11 Put more generally, the point is that Rihm uses tonal harmony in ways that allude to meanings derived from a once-established system, but that tonal system no longer controls harmonic function in his music. The influence of Mahler on Rihm’s early orchestral pieces reflects a more general Mahler reception history in the 1970s whereby his symphonies, which were once considered to be excessive, were absorbed into the concert repertoire.12 Within the field of new music, Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) adopts Mahler as a symbol of an expanded concept of musical material by deploying the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony as an underlay in its third movement. Related to this expansion, Mahler’s significance for Rihm, beyond its sound, is an understanding of music as a signifying practice. In different terminology, this aspect of Mahler was highlighted in Adorno’s 1960 monograph on the composer: What characterizes is, for that very reason [a lack of naivety], no longer simply what it is, but, as the word character intends, a sign. Mahler drew his functional characters – what each individual part contributes to the form – from the stock of traditional music. But they are used autonomously, without regard to their place in the established pattern.13

Adorno’s explanation of Mahler’s ability to create new meanings from established conventions certainly provides a precedent for the ways in which Rihm manipulates musical signs.

String chamber music Rihm’s engagement with the genre of the string quartet is substantial: there are thirteen numbered scores with the title ‘quartet’ that date from 1970 to 2012. These pieces relate to one another, while also resonating strongly with Rihm’s prevailing preoccupations over the years in a genre-specific way. Rihm’s Third String Quartet, Im Innersten (1976), did much to secure his prominence at an early age. The score’s idiosyncratic title, which translates

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awkwardly as ‘in the most inward’, gives a good indication of the music’s preoccupations. It even evokes the title of Janáček’s Second Quartet, Intimate Letters, and the agitated string writing is clearly influenced by this composer. This orientation takes in Beethoven too: the quartet includes a modified quotation (bar 6 of the fourth movement) from the opening violin melody of the Cavatina from Beethoven’s Op. 130 quartet, a movement that embodies the nineteenth-century idea of spiritual inwardness.14 (Rihm relates that Velte’s analyses of the late quartets ‘left me with the indelible impression of music which was highly organized and at the same time burst with expressive power’.)15 Joachim Brügge also notes that the fading viola thirds with which Im Innersten concludes recalls the closing statement of the fourth movement of Berg’s Lyric Suite, another score that emphasizes the personal.16 ‘Inwardness’ does not, however, evoke tonal certainty: even though A♭ becomes prominent as a pitch centre in the first movement and establishes itself in movements four and six, it does so not through tonal organization, but through repetition and intensity. In addition to the allusions just mentioned, the quartet extends its range of reference beyond the genre: the second movement recalls the lateRomantic feel of the orchestral works discussed earlier when it tapers down to an adagio that offers shelter from the surrounding agitated textures. However, Rihm’s ‘non-vibrato’ markings separate this music from its nineteenth-century precursors and contribute to its sense of stillness. Related music also returns in the final movement, where Rihm’s explicit instructions regarding dynamics, which ask for no transitions between levels, also create a degree of estrangement. However, this ‘Abgesang’ music is capable of more than one mood, as it appears elsewhere in different guises. Its emergence at the end of the second movement, for example, is immediately followed by a more motivic version, with ‘molto vibrato’, of the three-note descending figure. In the fourth movement, by contrast, the cell occurs in a much more assertive manner in music that has the ecstatic feel of Janáček to it. These transformations, which are intrinsic to the music, suggest that ‘inwardness’ is a multifaceted experience. Reflecting on the quartet in 1985, Rihm reveals that the title was taken from Joseph von Eichendorff’s ‘Sonnet 4’ from his cycle Sängerleben; he also emphasizes the physiological dimension of inwardness and enlists a quotation from Berthold Brecht to support his case. In keeping with this somatic interpretation, Rihm writes with regard to the second movement, marked ‘con moto – adagio’: ‘This systolic sequence of movement: peristalsis of the inner world, inner tension’.17 His terminology, which is congruent with the undoubted physical dimension of his music in general, certainly serves to distance the piece from the trappings of material detachment and

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transcendence that are normally associated with the inwardness of bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, the traditional sense of inwardness is undoubtedly there, even if it is brought into contact with the body’s innards in a thoroughly untranscendental way. This sense of the visceral and the spiritual is partly played out through the juxtaposition of Janáček and Beethoven. Even so, the moments of spirituality in this music are emotional shelters, thus they serve less to damage past achievements than to emphasize their fragility. The title of Rihm’s quartet undoubtedly reflected a prevalent mood at the time, but it was one that branched in different directions. The inner struggle of Rihm’s aesthetic, for example, is very different from the religious orientation of Sofia Gubaidulina’s approach. More directly related to Rihm is Nono’s inward turn in his string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima and in subsequent scores during the last decade of his life. Nevertheless, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Nono’s quartet was written after Rihm’s and influenced the younger composer mainly in the idea of free-standing sound events. The next milestone in Rihm’s string chamber music is not a quartet but a trio: Musik für drei Streicher (1977), for violin, viola and cello. By general agreement, this score is a landmark not only in Rihm’s oeuvre, but also in the field of twentieth-century chamber music. It was premiered at the Darmstadt summer course in 1978, along with string trios by Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Hans-Jürgen von Bose, where it won the Kranichstein Music Prize on an occasion that contributed to the perception of Rihm as belonging to a group of composers with a new orientation. Lasting over an hour, the score is cast in seven movements which divide into three parts: Part 1 comprises three movements, the third of which provides a substantial conclusion to this section of the piece; Part 2 comprises three canzonas, with the fifth and sixth linked by an intermezzo; and Part 3 comprises the hefty seventh movement, which completes the work in an ample manner. There is little doubt that this music evokes Beethoven’s late quartets, even if it does so in cryptic ways. Instead of enabling allusions or quotations to drift in and out of the texture, the trio uses material with historical resonances as fully worked motifs. The most ubiquitous of these is the opening three-note chord, E–F–A, which embodies the score’s dedication, ‘für Eva’ (which can also be spelled with an ‘F’). This cell permeates the score, but it is not until the third movement that it establishes itself as clear motivic material, emerging at bar 99 as a motif from the double-stops characteristic of this movement, and audibly facilitating a climax in bar 158. For Reinhold Brinkmann, the aural prevalence of the semitoneand-major-third combination is redolent of Beethoven: in a different

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Ex. 4.2a Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 130, opening of third movement

configuration, it is found for instance in the opening three notes, G♯–B♯–C♯, of Beethoven’s Op. 131 quartet (another seven-movement work).18 Brinkmann also draws attention to the presence of the opening bar of the third movement of Beethoven’s Op. 130 quartet (see Ex. 4.2a) in Rihm’s trio, and Brügge pursues this idea.19 This harmonic cell breaks through, in a manner comparable to the way in which the melodic adagio passages surface in Sub-Kontur, to offer some of the most intense music in the trio, especially late in the third movement. (Entitled ‘Double’, it seems likely that this movement’s heading refers to its prevalent double-stops, but it is equally possible that it signifies the idea of historical doubling.) The cell is heard, for example, in the climax at bars 207–13 (see Ex. 4.2b) before the final Presto and again at bars 282–92, shortly before the movement’s conclusion. It also emerges strongly in the seventh movement, at bar 69, shortly before the music becomes trapped in a long ostinato passage. Characterized by syncopated double-stops, these moments have an ecstatic feel to them which, as Brügge suggests, adds a sonorous, Janáček-like gloss to the Beethovenian context.20 They combine intensity with tonal resonance in a way that contrasts with the pulverized triads that are found elsewhere in Rihm’s music, notably in Klavierstück Nr. 7. The extended passages in the seventh movement in which a sustained chord is made to pulse by the use of ‘hairpin’ dynamics on each beat also create fields of intensity. It is conceivable that these ‘hairpins’ recall the idiosyncratic dynamic markings of Op. 130’s fourth movement, even though Rihm deploys these ‘squeezebox’ effects to create a very different sonic environment. The trapped ostinati of the seventh movement that follow the return of the syncopated ‘Beethoven chord’ inspired Rihm to

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Ex. 4.2b Rihm, Musik für drei Streicher, third movement, bars 207–13

include a quotation from Gustave Flaubert in the score: ‘The further I go, the more I find myself unable to put forward the idea.’ As it happens, the score does manage to go a little further beyond this point; it even returns to the ‘squeezebox’ idea. Nevertheless, this moment initiates a gradual cooling of the musical intensity. The Fourth Quartet (1981) is a transitional score: it contains the allusions characteristic of Rihm’s music in the 1970s, but it also hints at the chiselled sounds that are associated with his scores from the 1980s. The quantity of sketches for this piece also suggests that Rihm was working through new ideas, since he does not usually sketch extensively.21 Beethoven is no longer at the helm in the Fourth Quartet, despite the evocative declamatory motif

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that opens it. Instead, the focus is now on Janáček, who appears on a list of names Rihm associates with musical freedom.22 Again, it is Janáček’s Second Quartet, Intimate Letters, that is most in evidence, this time in Rihm’s frantic triadic figures which conspicuously exceed their accompanying role, as indeed also happens in Janáček’s model. This gesture appears early (bar 24) in Rihm’s first movement, in which it continues to surface, and it emerges in the final movement. However, it is in the second movement that it makes its presence most clearly felt in two ferocious outbursts. The first occurs after a section marked ‘Andante (Aria)’, which recalls the inwardness of the Third Quartet, with the melody over the impetuous cell recasting material related to the ‘Aria’. The second occurs after a slower section, which also deploys the ‘Aria’ material, this time concluding the movement in a suitably assertive manner. The other main ideas in the quartet are the march sections from the first movement and the adagio passages of the finale. Deriving from the dotted rhythms of the opening motif, the first movement march material (bar 75 is marked ‘Alla marcia’) evokes Mahlerian models. However, the adagio finale is not particularly Mahlerian, and is much sparser than its opulent predecessors in the Third Symphony. As in the Third Quartet, Rihm provides very precise expressive markings when nineteenth-century allusions are present: at bar 22, he writes, ‘quieto, possibile senza emozione’, and then gives instructions for no vibrato, except for the lines carrying the floating, expressive fragments of the ‘Aria’ theme from the second movement. Even though the Eighth Quartet (1988) opens with a gesture reminiscent of the close of the Fourth Quartet, the language is less referential and clearly shows the influence of the sound-sculpture idea that is so characteristic of Rihm’s music in the 1980s, only this time the free-standing events include the scrunching of paper. Post-John Cage, this is not such a remarkable occurrence, but it is unusual for Rihm, who normally adheres to standard instrumental techniques, and may indicate a nod in the direction of Lachenmann. Another extension of technique occurs in this piece when the players are asked to ‘write’ on the manuscript paper, using the tips of their bows, ‘con amore’. Rihm describes bringing the writing process itself into the music, to the extent that the ‘naked’ paper is thematized – presumably in the ‘scrunching’ moment.23 The nearly silent gesture of writing with the bows may well be a tribute to Luigi Nono’s Fragmente – Stille (1980), the influential string quartet in which the players are asked silently to contemplate words by Hölderlin. Rihm was moved to write about this score, as mentioned in Chapter 1, and he became personally acquainted with the Italian composer in 1980 – the year that marked the start of the latter’s influential late style.24 In addition, the score’s preoccupation with marks on paper is compatible with

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the idea that the medium is part of the music, and not a mere conduit for it. This notion of ‘writing’ may have been inspired by French theory, which was influential in the 1980s. Apart from the numbered quartets, other pieces include the Fetzen series, extending from 1999 to 2004, and the Quartettstudie (2004). The first two Fetzen are for string quartet only, Fetzen 4 is for accordion and viola, while the remaining five pieces are for quintet, with the added accordion inventively building on string sonorities. ‘Fetzen’ is an evocative word within Rihm’s lexicon, meaning ‘shreds’, or as the composer tells us, ‘fragments, tearings, small pieces, things either naturally incomplete or dismembered’.25 Clearly, the associative logic of the moment and the transfer of energy between fragments are important ideas in these miniature pieces that are characterized by bursts of rapid movement and sudden cuts. Together, the shreds interact to form a single piece – an accordion quintet.

Piano music The seven numbered Klavierstücke stretch from 1970 to 1980, encompassing the first major phase of Rihm’s career. Klavierstücke 2 and 3, from which Rihm now feels somewhat distant, do not appear in the Universal Edition catalogue.26 The notion of numbered Klavierstücke resembles Stockhausen’s own series of piano pieces too closely for the likeness to be coincidental; indeed, the impact of Stockhausen is more evident in this sphere than it is elsewhere. Yet these pieces also reveal Rihm gradually relinquishing the emphasis on structure characteristic of a previous generation. As noted earlier, Rihm uses the Stockhausen-influenced proportional scheme 5:7:2:9 in Dis-Kontur. This ratio also appears in Klavierstück Nr. 4 (1974), which was written during the composition of the orchestral piece, where its potential is explored on a smaller scale. The sequence is immediately evident in the first section of the score, in which events follow one another in precisely this pattern – and the aural impression created by great flourishes of notes is also reminiscent of Rihm’s teacher. Alongside the proportional scheme, however, Rihm also deploys the scaffolding of a rondo-like form that enables the opening material to recur in the middle and at the end in a manner that is not determined by the exigencies of a ratio. In this way, Klavierstück Nr. 4 achieves an idiosyncratic mix of avantgarde and traditional approaches to form.27 With Klavierstück Nr. 6 (Bagatellen), from 1978, the music-as-sign idea reaches a high level of density. As Rihm himself observes, the score came at the end of a time of intense compositional activity, which included the Third Symphony, the Hölderlin-Fragmente, Musik für drei Streicher, Jakob Lenz

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Table 4.1. Pre-existing music in Rihm, Klavierstück Nr. 6 Klavierstück Nr. 6, bar numbers

Source material

1–45 46–63 64–82 83–125 126–40 141–70 171–208

Includes Lenz quotation Hölderlin-Fragmente: ‘Wie Wolken um die Zeit legt’ Includes insert from Musik für drei Streicher Material based on extreme trills and tremolandi Hölderlin-Fragmente: ‘Aber nun ruhet er eine Weile’ Material based on extreme trills and tremolandi Erscheinung

and Erscheinung.28 He indicates too that it is a connecting piece which not only draws on already composed music, but also initiates future plans;29 and there is substance to these fleeting comments. Turning to the past first, Klavierstück Nr. 6 quotes extensively from the compositional phase it concluded, as indicated in Table 4.1, which does not attempt to track every fragment.30 The section extending from bar 17 to bar 29 is an arrangement of bars 150–61 from the twelfth scene of the chamber opera Jakob Lenz (1978), a scene in which the character Lenz, whose deterioration is advanced by this stage and who is unsure whether he is awake or asleep, is accompanied by voices whispering the name Friederike, which his unattainable beloved shares with a child who has died in a neighbouring village. Klavierstück Nr. 6 also alludes, briefly, to Musik für drei Streicher, by means of a motivic insert at bars 72–3, which includes, quite prominently, the chord Rihm takes from Beethoven’s Op. 130 quartet. The Hölderlin-Fragmente (1977), which are already constructed in a paratactic fashion, provide material as well. ‘Wie Wolken um die Zeit legt’ (‘like clouds wraps around the hours’) is used at bars 47–57, with bars 58–62 extending and developing the material until the unmistakable borrowing in bar 63. The piano solo from ‘Aber nun ruhet er eine Weile’ (‘But now he rests for a while’) is quoted exactly for three bars (127–9) and is alluded to until bar 138. Rihm’s willingness to slot the plainly tonal harmony found in the second of these fragments into a different context is a good indication that such harmony functions for him far more as an expressive device than as a structural tool – as one might expect from a composer who can align the Romantic fragment with modernist approaches to mobile form. On a larger scale, the final fragment – or Bagatelle – of the cycle is taken directly from Erscheinung (1978), which is subtitled ‘Skizze über Schubert für neuen Streicher und Klavier ad libitum’. The independent, self-standing

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solo piano piece from Erscheinung is used in its entirety for the conclusion of Klavierstück Nr. 6, where, arguably, it receives a more compelling context than in its original placing. What is more, the inclusion of music from Erscheinung in Klavierstück Nr. 6 creates an even richer semiotic environment if we take into account Rihm’s notes on this piece: using a photographic metaphor, Rihm suggests Erscheinung is a doubly exposed portrait of Schubert and Beethoven, by which he means that it is a piece about Schubert’s understanding of Beethoven. The ad libitum piano piece, according to Rihm, is intended as a shadow of the un-Schubertian melody at the beginning of Erscheinung. At any rate, this fragment has the effect of ending Klavierstück Nr. 6 with pitch-class set 3–5 (0,1,6), the so-called ‘Lenz chord’, which permeates the chamber opera of that name. Rihm’s references in this piece are generally to contemplative material. His new material, by contrast, mainly comprises explosive trills and tremolandi, which may well have an origin in late Beethoven, but which are taken to extremes that are not easily associated with traditional piano writing. However, the title, ‘Bagatelles’, clearly alludes to the Op. 119 and Op. 126 sets, and Rihm states that he was influenced by Beethoven’s technique of associations.31 In this sense, therefore, what Rihm has mainly taken from the Beethovenian model is the notion of fragments that form affinities, and it is also possible that some of the spare textures in his piano piece are influenced by the example of Beethoven’s Bagatelles. Important, too, with regard to the technique of associations, is the dedication of the piece to Rihm’s friend the artist Kurt Kocherscheidt, whom Rihm acknowledges as influential with regard to the open aspect of the work. It is this aspect of the cycle that points to the future, because interactions between sound objects became increasingly important for Rihm in the 1980s. Indeed, he went on to write a piece called Kolchis (1991), for five instruments, which takes its name from Kocherscheidt’s The Boys from Kolchis – an installation comprising four fin-like objects standing side by side. When all these dimensions are placed together, Klavierstück Nr. 6 emerges as a multivalent sign system: it alludes to the past, it quotes Rihm’s own music, and it links Beethoven’s associative techniques to the spatial dynamics of recent visual art. Klavierstück Nr. 7 (1980) has a physical directness that appears to break through the semiotic constraints of traditional piano repertoire. Nevertheless, Rihm is in no doubt that what he calls the ‘wild-gentle’ gestures of so-called late Beethoven were a primary impulse in this music.32 This ‘wild-gentle’ characteristic is evident from the outset, with a ‘Scotch snap’ rhythm articulated by intense dynamics. The demanding intention here is clearly stated in the score: ‘Dynamic very extreme! The second note always like a shadow of the first one.’ The unyielding

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application of this principle creates a large amount of energy, thus it is not surprising that the music dispenses with time signatures, using bar lines to indicate gestures that might shape the power of this music. Amidst this physicality, it is fitting that Klavierstück Nr. 7 provides perhaps the most extreme instance of recoding in Rihm’s oeuvre, in a passage where a tonal chord becomes the most ‘dissonant’ section in the music. The obsessive dotted rhythm becomes fixated with an E♭ triad that is repeated (bars 176–82) with such force that it is bleached of its traditional meaning (see Ex. 4.3). Initially, this moment might be heard as an allusion to the opening of Beethoven’s mighty Hammerklavier Sonata, but Rihm’s hammering is eventually sufficient to turn the chord into an object that is too battered to occupy comfortably a tonal frame of reference. Later works for piano include Zweisprache (Conversation, 1999), a collection of five sombre pieces, each of which is dedicated to the memory of a friend.

Ex. 4.3 Rihm, Klavierstück Nr. 7, bars 175–9

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Lieder Inclusivity, in Rihm’s hands, is not a matter of taking stable techniques from the past and rendering them unstable, but of responding creatively to an already present instability, especially in an Austro-German context. What’s more, he extends this approach to the lied, a genre unloved by the post-war avant-garde, often through the theme of mental illness – a major preoccupation in his stage works. Hölderlin-Fragmente, for voice and piano (1977), is a setting of nine fragments from Hölderlin’s late style, which also exists in a Mahlerian orchestrated version. The cycle is linked to Klavierstück Nr. 6 not just because the latter quotes from it, but also because both scores comprise a mosaic of fragments. There are parallels as well with the use of fragments by Nietzsche from a late style that is associated with mental deterioration in the Abgesangsszenen. But Hölderlin’s ephemeral lines, which lack connections, trigger music nearer in form and sound to Klavierstück Nr. 6 than to the orchestral settings. As Carola Nielinger-Vakil observes, it is not at the level of the phrase unit that Rihm engages Hölderlin’s mental instability but at the level of the phrase connection.33 Explaining Schlegel’s role in the nineteenth-century understanding of the fragment, John Daverio suggests that scores such as Schumann’s Papillons and the Novelletten require the listener to create fragment complexes from non-contiguous utterances.34 A comparable associative logic is at work in the ways that the HölderlinFragmente (and Klavierstück Nr. 6) move from one idea to another with little by way of transition. They thereby work with modernist and Romantic approaches to the fragment. In Rihm’s view, Hölderlin-Fragmente is a burned-out lieder cycle, in which ‘all the extreme changes are integral components of its destroyed, or unformed, language’.35 What this suggested juxtaposition of disintegration and the pre-symbolic indicates is a form of expression in which what Adorno calls the ‘language-character’ of music (that is, its learned and attributed meanings) survives in shards amongst the sometimes reduced and sometimes extreme gestures of Rihm’s music. The strongly tonal setting of ‘Aber nun ruhet er eine Weile’ (‘But now he rests for a while’) offers an example of one such island of communication. It also demonstrates the piano breaking free of an accompanying role in a way that exceeds the model offered by traditional lied preludes and postludes. The melody of ‘Aber nun ruhet er eine Weile’ returns, unaccompanied, at the end of the final fragment to offer a tonal memory at the completion of a cycle in which, once again, we find a juxtaposition of inner voice and semiotic contingency.

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Neue Alexanderlieder: Fünf Gedichte von Ernst Herbeck (1979), for baritone and piano, were written during the year in which the chamber opera Jakob Lenz premiered, and are dedicated to Richard Salter, who sang the part of Lenz, as well as subsequently taking principal roles in Rihm’s later music theatre pieces. It is certainly not hard to make the transition from Lenz, a figure who cannot find social acceptance, to Rihm’s invocation of the deranged sentiments of Herbeck, in a cycle in which allusions to the Romantic lied are fused with enactments of mental instability. The title of the cycle is explained by the fact that Ernst Herbeck (1920–91) published his best-known poetry under the pseudonym ‘Alexander’. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and spent much of his life in mental hospitals. His psychiatrist, Leo Navratil, played an active role in promoting and publishing his work; indeed, the Alexanderlieder texts are taken from Navratil’s Schizophrenia and Language. The opening song of Rihm’s setting, ‘Die Frau in Mir’, brings out the disconnected qualities of Herbeck’s verse by resorting to passages of extreme range and dynamics that are not implied by the preceding music. Not only does this device serve to alienate tonal harmony, it also manages to skew the strongly unifying tendencies of the repeated motif that Rihm deploys. The second song, ‘Der Herbst’, enables Rihm to engage with a tradition of hunting motifs, which are duly shattered by tremolandi marked ‘with terrible power’. The third song, ‘Ich mag euch alle nicht’ (‘I don’t like the lot of you’), conveys mental instability partly through a mismatch between words and music and partly through obsessive repetition. It opens with a strongly tonal, Schubertian broken-chord accompaniment in A♭ major. But the sense of wellbeing evoked by this gesture and by the lyrical vocal line grates with the mood of the misanthropic words and the disruptive accents in the piano. Moreover, the closure provided by a linear descent from E♭ to A♭ in the vocal part is skewed by the line ending on an A♭ seventh. This incongruity assumes another dimension when the song’s accompanying pattern turns to pounding E♭ minor chords, at bar 31 (see Ex. 4.4). These chords possibly evoke the urgent motion of Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, but, like the extreme example found in Klavierstück Nr. 7, they function more as visceral gestures than as tonal symbols. Any initial sense of completion that these chords might offer quickly evaporates because they sound neither like a resolution nor like a dominant; instead they signify something dissonant: they are experienced as intensities, or as Varèse-like sound objects that lack tonal meaning. Jacques Lacan’s semiotic interpretation of schizophrenia understands it as a break with the authority of language, whereby signifiers become detached from signifieds and thereby released from conceptual duties.

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Ex. 4.4 Rihm, Neue Alexanderlieder: 5 Gedichte von Ernst Herbeck für Bariton und Klavier, third song, bars 25–33

Building on this model, Fredric Jameson argues for a cultural form of schizophrenia whereby its intensities, which detach the present from the past, displace the established associations of anxiety and alienation.36 The disjunction between words and music at the opening of this song indicates

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that Rihm has not left behind old-style anxiety and alienation, and its initial use of tonality signifies the past in a very connected way. Nevertheless, the throbbing chords later on do indeed function as intensities that are detached from the structural context offered by the authority of tonality, even if that state is more threatening than Jameson’s model would indicate. Indeed, it is the ambiguity of jostling old-style anxiety alongside new-style intensity that creates much of the semantic richness in Rihm’s music, enabling the components of self to reconfigure themselves in unexpected combinations. What is interesting about this song is that it transforms the broken triadic figures and smooth vocal line of a Schubertian affinity with nature into the destabilizing intensity of the obsessive chords. This song is a profoundly unstable object which shakes aesthetic categories and confounds expectations, whether these are tonal or modernist, because its syntax is neither reassuringly familiar nor reassuringly ‘difficult’. It is certainly a feature of the Alexanderlieder that Rihm places disproportionate gestures near the ends of songs, as a way of conveying Herbeck’s not fully comprehensible semantic shifts. The final lines of the cycle consolidate this tendency by ending on a forced D minor seventh, again pushing an established device to the point of distortion. Wölfli-Liederbuch (1981), for bass baritone and piano (and two bass drums), sets texts by the Swiss farmhand, poet and artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), which reflect his mental illness in a combination of directness, confusion and abrupt mood changes. Rihm’s cycle alludes to Schubert’s lieder simultaneously as a model of lost innocence and as a symbol for a type of subjectivity that finds itself ill at ease with bourgeois conventions. The score’s opening folksong-like statement indicates that this music is not about nostalgia: it takes the standard lied device of addressing the beloved and provides an accompaniment of simple Schubertian textures to match the disarming directness of the words. As the words become more abusive, the accompaniment serves to increase the sense of incongruity. Prompted by Wölfli’s derangement, Rihm takes the idea of alterity further than Schubert could have envisaged in the fourth song, where the piano articulates a ninth chord in a drum-like way, until intensity and repetition bleach the sonority of any tonal allusions. At the conclusion of the cycle, in what is perhaps a disfigured recollection of a Schumann-like postlude, Rihm pushes this tendency to an extreme by replacing the voiceand-piano texture with two bass drums. Melody, harmony and language now give way to pulsating rhythm, suggestive of a collapse into psychosis. Such an interpretation is certainly endorsed by Rihm’s instructions in the score, which, moving into the realm of theatre, state that the music becomes a staged embodiment of the poet’s state of mind: ‘Wölfli works as if crazy,

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writes and draws as if insane, paints all over everything as if mad, and builds as if out of his mind.’37 What is more, these words provide something of a context for earlier pieces, notably Dis-Kontur and Sub-Kontur, in which Rihm deploys bass drums for their somatic energy. Rihm has continued to write lieder as his career has developed, with the topoi of Romantic imagery and psychological instability emerging again in the 1990 cycle Das Rot, a setting of poems by Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806), whose suicide ended a life marred by mental illness. The first and second songs feature in the third part of Edgar Reiz’s epic Heimat, which, like its predecessors, depicts life in Germany, this time from reunification to the new millennium. In fact, Günderrode provides something of a leitmotiv for the film because the house restored by the composer (and conductor) Hermann and the soprano Clarissa, the principal characters in the plot, was previously inhabited by the Romantic poet. The first time we hear the world-weary second song ‘Ist alles stumm und leer’ (‘All is silent and empty’), with its appropriately empty fifths, it is performed by its composer, Hermann, in his study as a response to his fear that Clarissa has left him. The next time we hear it, this time arranged for ensemble, is in a concert by the now reunited Hermann and Clarissa. On this occasion it is followed by the poignant dissonances of the lines ‘Deep red until death my love shall resemble you’ from the first song, ‘Hochroth’. The film serves, therefore, to provide a specific context for Rihm’s setting of Günderrode’s words. In 1999 Rihm wrote Ende der Handschrift, a setting of eleven deathinfused late poems by Heiner Müller, the poet and playwright to whom Rihm had already turned in Die Hamletmaschine.

Fremde Szenen One of Rihm’s most direct responses to another composer, in this case Schumann, occurs in his Fremde Szenen I–III (1982–4) for piano trio.38 Schumann features prominently in the important essay ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, which must have been written during the composition of Fremde Szenen. Furthermore, Rihm’s collected writings include two essays on Schumann, both of which discuss Fremde Szenen.39 Rihm’s fascination with Schumann is not surprising when one considers the parallels between the two composers. First, Schumann, like Rihm, was a literary composer who found it both necessary and easy to write about music; despite comments on the redundancy of programme notes, Rihm is skilled at describing his musical thoughts in a non-technical manner.40 Second, Schumann was an intertextual composer who quoted not only himself, but also other composers, most notably Beethoven in the C major Fantasy, where he created

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a new context and therefore meaning for the reworked material. Third, Schumann shared Rihm’s preoccupation with ciphers, although Schumann used them more as a personal code than as a stylistic resource. Yet even though the Fremde Szenen constitute one of Rihm’s most sustained engagements with an individual composer, they date from a time when he was moving away from the referential approach of the 1970s. This is why allusions to Schumann in these pieces jostle with events that are more akin to the sound objects of the Chiffre series, five of which were written between 1982 and 84. The three Fremde Szenen, subtitled ‘Versuche für Klaviertrio, erste Folge’ (‘Essays for Piano Trio, First Instalment’), are usually performed as a set, lasting a little over forty minutes, even though they do not form a unit in the traditional sense. The title is likely to have been influenced by Killmayer’s evocation of Schumann as a ‘fremder Mann’, as discussed in Chapter 2. Other possible sources would include ‘Von fremden Ländern und Menschen’ from Kinderszenen and ‘In der Fremde’, the opening song of the Op. 39 Liederkreis. In his programme note, Rihm makes clear that only Schumann’s tone is used, none of his actual music, and that the music does not seek security in period costume.41 He makes this comment in relation to Heiner Müller’s Quartet (1981) for four actors, the title of which refers to the chamber medium of the string quartet. More significant than that reference, however, is a more general feature of Müller’s theatre: it speaks through other voices. From this perspective, what Rihm takes from Müller is the idea that using the intonation (Tonfall) of another author does not amount to a costume drama, because languages of the past can be made to speak different meanings. Rihm detects a sense of strangeness most strongly in the last of Schumann’s three piano trios, the G minor, Op. 110, which was performed – along with Fremde Szenen I and II – during a presentation that was published as the essay ‘Fremde Blätter’.42 The influence of this score is certainly evident in the icy textures of Fremde Szene I, where Schumann’s gestures become hardened into a compilation of frequently sparse sounds, often using string harmonics. Rihm writes of this music: ‘Seeking the hot sound from cold intervals. Fire in ice.’43 Fremde Szene II, the longest of the three pieces, is subtitled ‘Charakterstück’, and the composer describes it as a personal portrait of Schumann and his style, associating the sounds with Schumannesque topics such as medical equipment and virtuosity.44 We encounter Schumann at his most familiar in this piece; indeed, while Rihm values the strangeness of the G minor Trio, he notes that it does not possess the swaying passion of the Trio in D minor, Op. 63, which makes its presence felt in Rihm’s broken piano figures and melodic cross rhythms.45

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Of the third piece, Rihm comments: ‘Actually only disreputable places. Concentration and its loss.’ In fact, he even writes ‘Verrufene Stelle’, bar 41, two bars before the only adagio passage in the set, echoing the title of a piece from Schumann’s Waldszenen, Op. 82. Heard with its companion pieces, the third performs something of a summative role: it opens with the spare textures of the first, brings back a dotted triadic passage from the second, and explores the obsessive repetition found in both of them. Fremde Szene II, which will be the focus of discussion, is unstable and restless, shifting from one mood, style or texture to another in an unpredictable manner by offsetting montages of violent, often repetitive and sometimes aggressively modernist gestures against lyric lines and flowing piano textures that are reminiscent of Schumann’s chamber works. Broadly speaking, this portrait is in sonata form, with clearly defined first and second subjects, which can be just about related to a D♭ major and A♭ major key scheme, even though there is plenty of ambiguity between these two centres in the second subject. The dispersed melody and exaggerated features of the opening bars, which may well have been influenced by the Second Intermezzo from the second piece of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16, build on the metric layering and displacement characteristic of Schumann. The two strings, which operate together rhythmically, move in and out of synchronicity with the fluid piano part, creating an illusory sense of a compound rhythm across the beat. The 5/4 time signature generates further ambiguity in this swaying rhythm, as does the grouping of all three instruments against the final three beats of the first bar. The second bar has three metric levels running through it, inflating to four in the piano right hand on beats 2 and 3; add to this quirky features such as the sffz in the piano on the final, A7, semiquaver of the fourth beat of bar 2, and there is considerable metrical instability. The second subject is approached by a driving dotted rhythm that may well have been influenced by the transition between first and second subjects in the opening movement of Schumann’s Op. 63 Trio (bars 15–26). However, unlike Schumann’s motif, which is used sequentially, Rihm’s achieves its impact by intensity of repetition and textural thickening (bars 39–46). The second subject itself, like Schumann’s, is a lyrical texture that suddenly emerges from the previous sonority – a melody intertwined with its accompaniment (see Ex. 4.5). However, this accompanying figure quickly breaks into the texture (bar 52); and later (bar 68) it almost vandalizes the lyric shape, with an outburst that smashes through the rhythmic layers. In one sense, the development section does what tradition dictates it should: it takes motivic shapes and transfigures them. In another sense, the

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Ex. 4.5 Rihm, Fremde Szene II, bars 47–52

repetition already heard in the exposition is driven here, through speed and dynamics, to a point of intensity (even violence) redolent of the primal gestures found in Tutuguri (1982). The outcome is that Schumann’s dotted rhythms, syncopations and accompanying figures are estranged by being transformed into unfamiliar, almost mechanical, processes, detached from their traditional harmonic roles. Rihm hints at the meaning of these sound objects when he writes ‘sub. kahl und kalt’ (‘bare and cold’) in the piano part at bar 259. Although these shapes might appear to be a chain of non-developmental block textures, they are directly related to the exposition – even the most static, repetitive material is either a transformation of earlier events or is used as a background to another process of change. The recapitulation contains a three-bar section, starting at bar 370, controlled by instructions that both capture and exceed the sense of excess already present in Schumann: ‘Insgesamt 5×. Jede weitere Wiederholung: Immer rastloser’ (‘Five times altogether. Each further repetition increasingly restless’). The first two bars of the passage are reminiscent of the second subject’s three descending tones, and the accompaniment of the last bar

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is derived from the first subject, which makes the passage like a small recapitulation in its own right. It crescendos from pp to ff and the bass ascends step by step from C to C (bar 373) leading, through intensity, to the sonic climax of the piece. Despite the voice-leading, this passage amounts more to a juxtaposition of two types of musical object than to a conventional reconciliation of first and second subjects. Shortly afterwards (bar 387), the process is repeated, with changes, leading to a passage (bar 398) designed to make the physical presence of the players very much part of the music, not least through its marking: ‘mit aller Kraft und verzweifeltem Schwung’ (‘with full power and desperate drive’). In ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, Rihm writes of Schumann’s speech ‘making its way from the inner to the outer world without undue strangulation’.46 However, this inner voice is far from straightforward because Rihm destabilizes the nineteenth-century model of internal subjectivity by linking it to the somatic self. This becomes clear when he comments, in another essay on Schumann: ‘But I hear Schumann as a composer who when he writes music always writes other music. One who writes music of an entirely other sort, which comes from the body, from beating.’47 This sentiment ties in with the obsession we find elsewhere, notably in the essay title ‘Musik – das innere Ausland’ (‘Music – the Inner Foreign Land’), that in music we encounter ourselves as in some way other.48 When Rihm talks about music as the inner foreign land, it is probable that he is speaking about a gestural, or pre-symbolic, form of subjectivity that music can access, in which case the (swaying) inner emotion that Rihm so values in Schumann is inherently unstable. This interpretation is certainly consistent with the visceral sense of inwardness that Rihm associates with his Third Quartet, as discussed above. These thoughts need to be considered alongside comments Rihm makes in the programme note on his reception of the past: taking his cue from the word ‘chamber’, he speaks of deserted rooms in which the forbidden can take place.49 When Rihm’s thoughts about Schumann are added to his perceptions of Fremde Szenen, the distanced, estranged perceptions of deserted rooms mix with the directness of a somatic sense of self that is linked to the nineteenth-century idea of subjectivity flowing from the inside to the outside. These shifting intersections actively explore the ways in which inner feeling is semiotically encoded, and conversely, they provide a manifestation of the ways in which human subjectivity can modify existing meanings. Put concisely, this music combines the body, the inner self and the semiotic self, just as the third of the Alexanderlieder songs juxtaposes modernist anxiety and postmodernist intensity.

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The flow of this music suggests that the future and the past can intersect on multiple horizons by placing the familiar and the unfamiliar in a dialogue capable of turning the one into the other. These pieces enact ways of simultaneously inhabiting and transforming historical material, without drawing a rigid boundary between these states, like a form of hermeneutics that modifies its object in the process of understanding. They are distinctive because they not only sound like Schumann, they also sound like Rihm: they feel like Rihm speaking in another language yet without losing his own musical voice. It is as if the material has become aware of the discontinuities and interruptions in its own hermeneutic horizons by seeking the strangeness of a previously inhabited space. Given Rihm’s interest in visual art, it might be said that he has painted a layer over Schumann, using a substance that not only covers the underlying surface but also modifies it in the process; the outcome creates myriad perspectives for listeners and performers alike.

Fig. 3 Wolfgang Rihm at the 30th Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1980.

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Events, voices and layers It is indicative of Rihm’s change in orientation during the 1980s that he started writing more music for ensemble instead of for established instrumental combinations; and even when he did write for orchestra, his spatial approach to the medium departed from nineteenth-century custom and practice. A good way to approach this altered perspective is by considering how his understanding of the word ‘Chiffre’ (cipher) shifts in the 1980s away from his practice in the 1970s of using it to convey the way that allusions participate in a larger sign system. As noted earlier, Rihm deploys the term ‘Chiffre’ in relation to Sub-Kontur when he describes the emergent melodic adagio as a cipher of an existing type of musical language.50 More conspicuously, the term occurs in the heading to his Jakob Lenz programme note: ‘Chiffren von Verstörung. Anmerkungen zu Jakob Lenz’ (‘Ciphers of Disturbance: Comments on Jakob Lenz’).51 Rihm explains this title by stating that Lenz the historical figure became less significant to him during the compositional process than a perception of the Lenz character as a cipher of disturbance, that is, as a figure signifying various stages of disintegration. And one of the principal means by which this dissolution is conveyed is by associating most of the allusions in this score with the voices inside Lenz’s head, which only he hears. As a final example, Rihm uses the word ‘Chiffre’ to denote the ways in which he alludes to Schubert in Erscheinung.52 It would be a mistake to argue that the aesthetic of inclusivity is applicable only to Rihm’s scores from the 1970s. After all, Fremde Szenen, with its Schumann references, and Die Hamletmaschine, with all its reflections on tradition, date from the 1980s. Nevertheless, Rihm’s music did undergo a reorientation in this decade, which meant that allusions are no longer automatically to be expected. Yet paradoxically, the word ‘Chiffre’ occurs even more frequently at this time, but now with a meaning intended to convey the direct presence of something.

The Chiffre cycle and Klangbeschreibung Most obviously, ‘Chiffre’ provides a title for the series of ten (including Bild) pieces, ranging in instrumental forces from three to seventeen players. Nine of these scores were written between 1982 and 1988; the tenth, Nach-Schrift (eine Chiffre), which concludes the series, dates from 2004, even though it reconfigures Chiffre I material taken from 1982. The Chiffre pieces take the idea of Rihm’s music as a sign system further in the sense that they are linked by an elaborate set of connections. One of these is that they rework the same material; another is that they recall modernist idioms, with Edgard Varèse

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exerting the strongest influence. He is, after all, one of the privileged names mentioned in the contemporary essay ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, where Rihm writes enthusiastically of Varèse’s sculpturally direct discovery of sound and sound objects.53 This influence is already evident in the ‘dissonant triad’ of Klavierstück Nr. 7, but Chiffre II takes this precedent further because its blocks of internally clashing brass writing actually sound like Varèse. Such networks and evocations notwithstanding, Rihm’s understanding of the term ‘Chiffre’, with regard to these pieces, is not concerned with allusions: ironically, it seems to function in precisely the opposite sense of a sign not referring beyond itself. As now applied, the word denotes a fusion of sign and meaning similar to the one evoked when, switching medium, Rihm comments of painting, in the year in which Chiffre II, III and IV appeared: ‘the visible trace of the sign setting is often identical with the sign itself: it is the sign’.54 Elsewhere, in a comment on the whole series, he talks of a search for sound objects, for sound signs: writing in sound. In addition, Rihm elaborates on his approach, in a note to the first three pieces, when he speaks of hieroglyphs and ‘fremde Zeichen’ (‘strange signs’).55 It is no surprise that these pieces overlap with the time frame of Fremde Szenen, given that talk of ‘fremde Zeichen’ clearly resonates with the idea of Schumann’s gestures as components of a not easily decoded foreign language – even if this intertextuality rubs against the grain of Rihm’s preferred perspective. From the hammered octave A’s at the extremes of the keyboard that open Chiffre I, it is clear that the piano is to play a prominent role in this score. Elaborating his notion of ‘Chiffre’, Rihm writes of the piano engraving itself into its surroundings ‘like a cuneiform script, leaving wounds, signs’. He also conceives of the seven-piece ensemble as a resonator for the piano, as if the piano is inscribing its own script.56 Certainly, this score uses the piano principally as a percussion instrument, with an emphasis on its mechanical aspect: instead of rich chords, the instrument generates thin, repetitive gestures in constant motion (Ex. 4.6). By contrast, the resonating ensemble plays sustained chords and blocks of motivic shapes, which become closer in character to the piano’s agitated figures towards the end of the piece. The resulting impression is indeed one in which the ensemble creates a responsive sound space for the angular piano lines. Writing about the cycle, Rihm refers to free-standing, or freely set, individual events, an important and recurring idea in his music.57 In a later conversation, he talks of responding to the spontaneity of the moment, while being aware of its potential to be something more than itself. This is a two-way process, he maintains: on the one hand, the moment is not lost to a larger process, while on the other, that larger process is not merely established by coincidence.58 This aspiration, which has much in common with

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Ex. 4.6 Rihm, Chiffre I, bars 44–6

the sentiments of Adorno’s famous essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’, hankers after a certain degree of openness, because when the relationship between moment and form is not predetermined, it becomes more pliable. There is no doubt that the reconfiguration of musical ideas is a driving force in the Chiffre cycle. In many ways, Chiffre II is a reconfiguration of Chiffre I. Again, the piano is conspicuous, but this time the ensemble is doubled in size to fifteen players. The first nineteen bars of the piano entry starting one bar after rehearsal letter ‘B’ in Chiffre II are taken directly from the passage starting at bar 43 in the score’s predecessor that is shown in Ex. 4.6. As well as replicating the piano writing, Rihm retains many features, including harmony, of the ensemble scoring. What is new, however, is the way he involves some of the ensemble in the jagged piano writing and sharpens the accents in the sustaining instruments. In both scores the piano writing dwindles to a

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single-note triplet A at the very top of the instrument. Chiffre II takes this idea and works with it as a sometimes unaccompanied figure, creating a result not unlike ‘Schattentanz’ from Lachenmann’s Ein Kinderspiel (1982) for piano. When other sections of Chiffre I are reworked in Chiffre II, the latter score again offers a greater range of textures, which include extensions of the piano gestures, within the ensemble. This score’s full title, Silence to be Beaten (Chiffre II), is derived from instructions found over the empty bar just before the end of Varèse’s Arcana; ever inventive, Rihm has taken this score marking and developed it into a more elaborate musical idea. Most obviously, this wording relates to a passage, about halfway through the piece, in which the conductor is instructed to conduct, or beat, invisibly. The sequence of events is quiet violin harmonics, a couple of thuds from the two bass drums, a long pause, and the virtually inaudible re-entry of the two bass drums at the start of a massive, sustained crescendo. (At the start of this roll Rihm uses the descriptive marking ‘wie ein Naturlaut’, ‘like a sound of nature’, that is found at the opening of Mahler’s First Symphony.) In this context, the silence is beaten in order to compel it to sound. In a more general sense, Rihm talks of projecting, or beating, silence out of the sounds.59 This second meaning is brought to mind by the action of the piano hammer reiterating the high triplet A’s, each of which is defined between the silence that marks the end of one repetition and the start of the next. Indeed repetitive piano figures remain a central feature of this cycle, and thereby enable intertextual associations between the pieces. By the time we reach Chiffre VIII, which retains shreds of the earlier pieces, the idea of isolated sound events interacting with one another across space has become more extreme, in music that actively transfers energy between moments. The overall conception is congruent with Rihm’s focus on sound-sculpture at this time, which is concerned not with constructivist models of multidimensional objects, but with the idea of sound as tactile, as plastic, as something to be moulded in the composer’s hands. This approach is illustrated when Rihm comments in 1988: ‘I am then a sculptor who takes material in the hand and must bring it to life.’60 Before pursuing this idea in other scores from the 1980s, it is worth concluding discussion of the Chiffre cycle by adding that Nach-Schrift (eine Chiffre) pushes the cycle into the next stage of Rihm’s development, where the idea of movement becomes paramount as a way of sliding sound events into motion. The sound-sculpture quotation that was just mentioned in relation to Chiffre VIII is located in an essay which considers, among other matters, Rihm’s Klangbeschreibung (1982–7), an orchestral triptych of monumental proportions that was composed during the years in which the majority of

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the Chiffre pieces were written. It embodies the idea of ‘every sound as a sculpture in itself’, and like the Chiffre pieces seeks to embody gestures in sounds.61 Drawing on the notion of sounds occupying their own spaces while simultaneously exerting an influence on one another, it also shows the influence of Nono’s experimental opera Prometeo. Klangbeschreibung I is scored for three orchestral groups, and Klangbeschreibung III for a large orchestra. By contrast, the middle piece, subtitled Innere Grenze, is scored for four female voices, five brass players and six percussionists. It takes words from the Nietzsche poem ‘Der Wanderer und sein Schatten’ that Rihm also drew upon in the Vierte Abgesangsszene. Although Rihm has used the poem before, placed in the context of a score strongly influenced by Nono it recalls the image of wandering without a path that the latter had evoked frequently in the 1980s. Even though Klangbeschreibung II is the least extreme of the triptych in terms of isolated events, the contrast with the Vierte Abgesangsszene is stark. For one thing, Rihm sets single words which, like the sounds, are released from the obligations of syntactic continuity; consequently, the aura of nineteenth-century symphonicism is lost. For another, he set the text for four voices, which further disperses the words in an expanded vocality. Comparable intertwined vocal lines are characteristic of Rihm’s vocal writing in the 1980s, and beyond: they are also to be found in Die Hamletmaschine (1983–6) and especially Die Eroberung von Mexico (1987–91).

Frau/Stimme, Gesungene Zeit and Eine Stimme 1–3 In Frau/Stimme (1989), for soprano and orchestra with soprano, the soundblock principle, as well as the expanded voice idea, is enhanced by the spatial distribution of instruments and voices. In particular, a solo soprano is enriched by a soprano situated in the orchestra, creating a vocal enlargement that is particularly evident in the high writing towards the end of the piece. This device is also found in the dispersal of the Aztec king’s (soprano) voice in Die Eroberung, as is the mirroring of the voice(s) by bowed ‘cymbales antiques’ (crotales). Like Die Hamletmaschine, Frau/Stimme also sets words by Heiner Müller, in this case from his Der Auftrag: Erinnerung an eine Revolution, a ferocious script which explores the theme of treachery. Rihm’s text derives from one speech, opening ‘I am the Angel of Despair’, made by a character entitled ‘Woman/Voice’. Müller’s intention, presumably, was that the lines can be spoken by a disembodied voice, an absence that is acknowledged by the placing of Rihm’s orchestral soprano. Heard in the context of the last

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part of Die Hamletmaschine, Rihm’s aim may have been that the expanded vocality would transcend the despair of the words. The song principle is so strong in Gesungene Zeit (1992), for violin and orchestra, that it is tempting to hear the solo violin as another version of Rihm’s Aztec king. The notion of the solo violin as a voice is certainly supported by Rihm’s programme note, which opens with the words ‘chanted, not “played”’. The deflected vocal mirroring that characterizes the scoring for Montezuma, and associated vocalists, is particularly evident in the opening of Gesungene Zeit, in which the very high solo violin line is echoed by string harmonics. Furthermore, the violin-voice, like Montezuma’s, is also mirrored by bowed ‘cymbales antiques’, especially at the close of the score, where the soloist takes the final pitch from these instruments. Eine Stimme 1–3 (2005), for mezzo-soprano and ensemble, demonstrates that the vocal mirror idea continues to be active in the new millennium. It also shows Rihm adopting a by now familiar pattern of adding to and reworking existing material. The score started life as one piece, written in 2004, and was followed by two others, completed in 2004 and 2005. These components combine well together for two main reasons. First, each is created for the same ensemble of a wordless mezzo-soprano, flute, clarinet, piano, viola, cello, bass and a large range of percussion (mainly tuned), which requires six performers (the score was premiered by Les Percussions de Strasbourg). Second, each is derived consistently, if not slavishly, from a nearly identical succession of pitches that are presented by the voice, so that the music creates new expressive potential by linking extensive modification of the central thread to new textures. ‘Eine Stimme 1’ sets the mood for the whole work, with the voice used almost as another instrument in the ensemble, again in association with bowed antique cymbals, and with the soloistic writing for the flute and clarinet intertwining with its lines so as to create a kind of augmented vocality that is redolent of the sonority Rihm creates for Montezuma through similar means. ‘Eine Stimme 2’, which is appropriately subtitled ‘aria’, takes the mixture of sustained and compressed gestures found in its predecessor and turns these shapes into something more expansive (it feels slower, even though both pieces share an underlying tempo of crotchet equals 60), so that what was, for example, originally a flourish becomes a luxuriously prolonged line. ‘Eine Stimme 3’ changes the character of the underlying pitches, again by stretching the line, but also by means of a quicker tempo (vivace, agitato) that imparts a more urgent quality to the music. It also renders the vocal line less continuous than in the previous piece, thereby generating more disconnection between voice and ensemble.

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Fleuve Klavierstück Nr. 6 provides an example of Rihm’s willingness to reconfigure existing music, and the Chiffre cycle takes this tendency a stage further by placing new layers over existing material. This trend is extended and intensified in the 1990s, notably in the fleuve scores, the Formen group and the Seraphim collection. These scores are associated with the idea of ‘Übermalung’ (overpainting), a term that Rihm uses, following the example of the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, to describe the process of adding layers to existing music. Obviously this procedure functions rather differently when applied to music instead of painting, because a new layer of music will not necessarily cover up the old texture in the way it might with a painting. Nevertheless, this painterly approach to layering is congruent with the semiotic dimension of Rihm’s music, since the sense of a hidden contour, or of music stratified in such a way as to let levels rise and sink (as already exemplified in Sub-Kontur), suggests a canvas in which an underlying shape is partly visible and partly concealed. Despite the aesthetic sophistication of the ‘Übermalung’ idea, reference to Rihm’s manuscripts shows that in practical terms ‘Übermalung’ can be a rather prosaic matter of cut-and-paste, whereby manuscript paper is glued to a photocopy of the previous version since Rihm does not use notation software. The second tendency from the 1990s is the sense of flow and movement, which is frequently indicated by score markings. This conception is a deliberate departure from the sound-sculpture idea that prevailed in the 1980s, because it connects the once-isolated moments through musical lines. However, the idea of motion, certainly as applied to the fleuve group, relates not only to movement within this music, but also to the ‘Übermalung’ idea, because the music floods beyond the boundaries, or confines, of a single score. The aesthetic of adding new layers and reconfiguring existing material, together with a sense of dynamic musical movement are both evident in the fleuve cycle, as its title suggests. Moreover, the momentum added to formerly isolated events reinvigorates in this cycle the sense of Rihm’s music as a semiotic network, in this case bringing back the signifiers of nineteenth-century symphonicism. The rather modest –et nunc, for wind and percussion, is a nodal score from the perspective of Rihm’s approach to ‘Übermalung’, and was to form the basis of an extensive series of transformations.62 It exists in two versions, presented on the same score, that are called appropriately –et nunc I (1992) and –et nunc II (1993). –et nunc II is simply –et nunc I with an insertion of 52 bars between bars 231 and 232 of –et nunc I, and an extra 29 bars at the end. In both versions of the score, blocks of sound communicate with one another across pauses in the manner of Rihm’s music from the 1980s.

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Two further scores were derived from –et nunc II, Sphere (1994) and Nachstudie (1994), before Rihm commenced on the fleuve cycle. On the whole, Sphere, which is described as ‘Kontrafaktur mit KlavierGegenkörper’, is –et nunc II with an additional piano, which was written on manuscript lines the composer added to a photocopy of the score. There are, however, deviations from the underlying score: for example, Sphere adds an extra six bars before entering what was the first insertion in –et nunc II, and it parts company with –et nunc II in the penultimate bar by adding an extra twenty-four bars. Nachstudie is simply the piano part of Sphere detached from its original context as a piece for piano solo. The word ‘contrafacta’ found in the sub-heading to Sphere refers to the medieval technique of writing over an existing text, a precedent that is directly related to the ‘Übermalung’ idea. At any rate, the idea of materials in different stages existing alongside one another is greatly extended in the subsequent transformations of –et nunc II. Having overwritten –et nunc II with a piano part to create Sphere, Rihm then returned to the same piece (without the piano) as a basis for Vers une symphonie fleuve I (1995), which in its turn generated another four successors. The underlying layer is not altered much, apart from a huge increase in instrumentation in the last bar, which in –et nunc II was empty except for woodblocks. The major difference is the addition of string parts: because these are sustained, they fill in the gaps of the wind writing, turning what were islands of sound into continuous texture. In a striking fashion, this stratum connects the music and propels blocks of sound into motion. As a result, the pre-existing object is modified, because it is partly submerged, and because what is heard of it is presented in a new context. Ex. 4.7 shows the opening page of Vers une symphonie fleuve I: the clarinet parts are from –et nunc II, while the the other lines have been pasted on to the score; with the exception of the opening metronome indication, all the tempo markings are new. Bar 221 of fleuve I, marked ‘♩ = mindestens 80’ (this tempo becomes ‘mindestens 100’ in fleuve IV, bar 184), serves to demonstrate the changed character of the music. The ascending semitones and multilayered dynamics of the wind parts from –et nunc II are now heard alongside rising string triplets that give more momentum to the wind-writing figure. The sense of movement, or of a river in flow, in fleuve I is also reinforced by the score markings, such as the instruction ‘nach und nach etwas fliessender’ at bar 20, and ‘nach und nach bewegter’ at bar 157. In fact, the later moment turns out to be significant in subsequent versions of fleuve, particularly in Vers une symphonie fleuve III (1995): a solo horn line, developing into a horn ensemble, emerges at this point (bar 171), creating further continuity in the texture and also providing a timbral resource for Vers une symphonie fleuve IV (1998), bar 115.

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Ex. 4.7 Rihm, Vers une symphonie fleuve I, bars 1–13

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Ex. 4.7 (cont.)

The modifications between the five versions of fleuve are varied: Rihm paints on new surfaces, modifies the orchestration, thickens and thins textures, and adds and deletes passages of varying sizes.63 The progression from fleuve III to IV, however, is extreme: the latter piece takes a block from the former, lasting from bar 160 to the end, and surrounds it with new music. When relocated within fleuve IV, the block from fleuve III extends from bar 101 to bar 350 (bars 347–9 are transitional: the concluding chords of fleuve III trail off beneath a powerful superimposed string melody that continues into the next section). Furthermore, the transformations do not stop there, because Rihm also writes new textures over parts of the inserted material. At bar 264, for example, he ‘paints’ (by means of glued-in manuscript) a string melody over what was primarily a wind texture, which he then dovetails into the existing melody at bar 271 (beat 3). The opening rising sequences of fleuve IV, which are marked ‘in unruhig fließender Bewegung’, are new material that bring to the score a surging

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momentum, perhaps reminiscent of Sibelius, that its predecessor lacked.64 Also new is the material that intensifies the climactic end of fleuve III, leading to a series of high points that start to undermine the traditional sense of the music having culminated or reached a goal. Eventually, however, these give way to the slow, quiet final section and the eventual return of the opening sequences. Further modifications and insertions continue with fleuve V (2000), in which the flow engulfs a separate piece, Spiegel und Fluss (1999). The overall conception is of a symphonic river, fed by numerous tributaries. One of the influences Rihm mentions in his note to fleuve I is Hubert Fichte’s notion of a ‘roman fleuve’ (flowing novel), as exemplified by his seventeen-volume Die Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit (The History of Sensibility).65 Fichte’s example, however, functions less as a concrete model for Rihm than as an idea that fires his imagination. When Rihm says, at a later stage, that ‘figures and situations appear, disappear and reappear again . . . ’, he draws attention not only to Fichte, but also to the painterly way that elements surface and submerge in his music.66 He also brings to mind Adorno’s description of the manner in which Mahler’s symphonic flow modifies the attributes of thematic figures in ways comparable to those in which characters change during the course of a novel.67 The temporality of the novel linked to the image of a moving river serves to create the concept of a fluid human subjectivity, or what Rihm calls ‘emotion in form’.68 The title Vers une symphonie fleuve provides a strong hint that Adorno’s essay ‘Vers une musique informelle’ was also an ingredient in Rihm’s conception of this music, and this is confirmed by Rihm’s programme note to fleuve I. Elsewhere, Rihm comments: ‘I read this text [“Vers une musique informelle”] very often and from the very beginning had the feeling of being directly addressed: it is meant for me.’69 Famously, this essay envisages modern music dissolving the categories of traditional music, so as to reinvent them without the associated restrictions. Rihm’s sense of the moment and the form interacting with each other, without either controlling the other, addresses the fundamental hope of Adorno’s essay. In the context of fleuve, the sense of ‘musique informelle’ is realized through the idea of form being in motion and it being subject to reconfiguration, in a way that unsettles the traditional organic emphasis in symphonic writing. Furthermore, this protean dynamic has resonances with Pierre Boulez’s idea of the work-in-progress, which leads him frequently to revise scores. Even though the latter’s approach to multidimensional proliferation, which has its roots in serial thinking, is not easily reconciled with Rihm’s allusions to nineteenth-century symphonism, both approaches facilitate a flexibility of form which brings to mind Adorno’s vision.

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Although it may only be fleuve IV that eventually establishes itself in the repertoire, there is undoubtedly something to be gained from listening to the ways that different versions of the fleuve idea generate new latencies from similar underlying material. Rihm’s fascination with the semiotics of nineteenth-century symphonism, and his preoccupation with reconfiguring existing material, continued in the new millennium with Verwandlung (2002), Verwandlung 2 (2005) and Two Other Movements (2004).

Forms Pursuing forms in multiple directions is the underlying theme in Jagden und Formen (Hunts and Forms, 2001) and its associated scores: Gejagte Form (Pursued Form, 1996), Verborgene Formen (Hidden Forms, 1997) and Gedrängte Form (Compressed Form, 1998). Like the fleuve scores, Jagden und Formen and its precursors share and modify material. Yet the way that Jagden und Formen absorbs earlier scores is different to the way that the later fleuve pieces add significant amounts of new material. In some ways, Jagden und Formen is the conclusion to a process that started nearly twenty years earlier with Chiffre I. The two groups of pieces are linked not only by being scored for ensemble and by reconfiguring earlier material, but also by their shared preoccupation with the onsets of sounds. Rihm’s opening remark on Gejagte Form indicates the climate of this piece, and its successors. ‘There is a moment in which pursuit of (a) form turns into (its) form. But this moment can neither be frozen nor stored.’ The underlying idea, then, is that the music is in pursuit of its own form, which it can never quite pin down. The piece is characterized by fast, jagged homophonic signals, which are easily recognized when they occur in Jagden und Formen. Incidentally, Gejagte Form is dedicated to Lachenmann, who, Rihm observes, also hunts for forms.70 Verborgene Formen, which is scored for twenty-one players (including three percussionists), takes off in a rather different direction by using the outer movements of another piece from the mid 1990s, Pol – Kolchis – Nucleus (1996). (Pol for thirteen instruments is itself already an overpainting of an earlier version for six players.) In relation to the hidden forms of Verborgene Formen, Rihm states that ‘Nucleus’ appears as a ‘destroyed, disintegrated shape’, while ‘Pol’ functions as a ‘subcutaneous, untouched figure, its surface much rubbed, scratched, criss-crossed’.71 Put more prosaically, Table 4.2 shows that the whole of ‘Pol’ runs, as a single insertion, from bar 33 to bar 141 of Verborgene Formen. Although instruments are added to ‘Pol’, it does not contain insertions. ‘Nucleus’, by contrast, loses some of its opening and closing music, and is chopped

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Table 4.2. Pre-existing music in Rihm, Verborgene Formen Verborgene Formen, bar numbers

Source material and bar numbers

1–7 8–32 33–141 142–51 152–91 192–204 205–25

17–23 of ‘Nucleus’ New material Whole of ‘Pol’ New material 24–63 of ‘Nucleus’ New material 64–84 of ‘Nucleus’ ‘Nucleus’ has another 8 bars; ends bar 92

into three parts. Although these sections are detached from one another, they run in sequence, with the two outer portions forming the opening and closing statements of Verborgene Formen. Between these passages, Verborgene Formen includes three segments of newly composed music. Tuned percussion is prominent in this piece, cutting across the more jagged rhythms and making its presence felt in trilled sonorities; it even generates music reminiscent of American minimalism. The slow music with which Verborgene Formen ends is recognizable in Jagden und Formen. Gedrängte Form is characterized by its virtuosic cor anglais writing, which, on a smaller scale, is also found in Verborgene Formen. It combines ‘hunting/hunted’ motifs reminiscent of Gejagte Form with the embellished, trilled textures of Verborgene Formen. Instead of painting a line over pre-existing music, in this case Rihm does the opposite: he extracts a line and builds around it. He takes the soloistic viola line from Verborgene Formen (which is largely from the ‘Pol’ section), sometimes retaining its doubling on the cello, and runs it through a large part of Gedrängte Form, thereby constructing the score around this strand. The end result is that the line, in dialogue principally with the cor anglais and (to a lesser extent) the flute, becomes enveloped in a new texture. The clarity of this texture is aided by the absence of the clarinet that interacts with the tuned percussion in Verborgene Formen. The means by which Jagden und Formen incorporates previous scores are anything but straightforward: it reorders large and small sections, repeats material, includes new insertions, and adds a rhythmically distinct brass signal as a form of punctuation. In fact, there is little new material in the score; most of it can be traced to the earlier pieces, as Table 4.3 demonstrates. These processes become even more entangled when the derivations

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Table 4.3. Pre-existing music in Rihm, Jagden und Formen Jagden und Formen, bar numbers and tempi 1–65: ‘Schnell’

66–141 142–50 151–60: ‘Sehr schnell’ 161–88: ‘Schnell (Tpo. 1)’ 189–228: ‘Schnell und hart’

229–40 241 242–371 (includes varied tempi) 372–457 ‘Fliessende’ 458–70: ‘plötzlich sehr schnell’ 471–91 492–500 501–40: ‘Weiter: so schnell wie möglich’ 541–708: includes ‘Schnell’ and ‘Langsam’ markings 709–12 713–38 739–78 779–87 788–96: ‘So schnell wie möglich’ 797–806 807–40 (various tempi) 841–9: ‘plötzlich wieder: sehr schnell’ 850–63: ‘so schnell wie möglich’

Material used Opening violin duet, which expands into a larger string texture, is derived from the opening pitch collection of Gejagte Form Gejagte Form, with added string layer Punctuating brass signal Verborgene Formen Gedrängte Form Opening of Gejagte Form again, this time with additional layer for unison cor anglais, harp and marimba Gejagte Form continues, with additional bar lines New bar Gedrängte Form The high trombone solo; new Gejagte Form

Bar numbers of source materials

1–76 142–51 1–28 1–40

50–5 (41–9 cut)

29 to end (bars 44–6 cut) 15–27

Gejagte Form Punctuating brass signal Gedrängte Form; texture thickened with additional chords Verborgene Formen

1–40

Insertion continues ‘minimalist’ texture from previous section Verborgene Formen String parts from Jagden und Formen; with new layer String parts from Jagden und Formen; with new layer Verborgene Formen

177–202 66–105 (106–32 cut) 133–41 193–201

Insertion Verborgene Formen Punctuating brass signal

202 to end 142–50

Gejagte Form; string texture thinned

56–76

33–200

178–91

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Table 4.3. (cont.) Jagden und Formen, bar numbers and tempi

Material used

864–76 877–82 883–8 889–96 897–1053 (various tempi) 1054–63: ‘poco più mosso possible’ 1064–80 1081–6 1087–105

Gejagte Form; harp replaced by unison piano and strings Gejagte Form Gejagte Form Gejagte Form Gejagte Form Insertion Gejagte Form New link Gejagte Form

Bar numbers of source materials 15–27 56–61 49–55 28–35 68–224

225–41 242–60

of source scores are taken into account. When Gedrängte Form occurs in Jagden und Formen, for example, it is already a version of Verborgene Formen, and it is therefore not surprising that bar 161 of Jagden und Formen can effect a transition, without any intervening material, from Verborgene Formen to Gedrängte Form. In addition, source scores are modified, as when several short sections of Gejagte Form are juxtaposed at the end of Jagden und Formen. Although the material is very different from the symphonic derivations of the fleuve pieces, a sense of momentum remains important: Rihm marks the new section that contains an alarmingly high trombone solo, ‘Fliessende’. The idea of hunting for forms conveyed in the title of Jagden und Formen relates to the prospect of a ‘musique informelle’, because it suggests that form is not pre-given but is instead pursued and comes into being in the process of that pursuit. This is certainly how Rihm chooses to understand the matter: Form and self – these are two forms that one has to work towards, dynamically and processually. In other words, in time and with time. And, of course, this is particularly true of music. Like the ‘self’, ‘form’ does not exist a priori. Both have to be created. And both remain in a state of change.72

The implication is that form cannot be established in advance because it derives from immersion in material. Part of this flexibility for Rihm is achieved through the process of forgetting, since as he puts it: ‘Forgetting a process and putting it behind one is part of the process itself.’ Furthermore,

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he manages to align the idea of hunting and pursuit with the notion of evolving form when he suggests that both form and self undergo a certain unfurling: ‘The hunt is about form, the hunt is the form.’73 Clearly, any of the Formen pieces can be listened to as a composition in its own right, without knowledge of the related pieces. Yet the mobility of form in these scores challenges the boundaries of the self-contained whole by suggesting that the material is not restricted to a single configuration. In achieving this flexibility, Rihm engages with the old avantgarde quest for the open work – a latent concern in his music since the early 1970s. However, instead of offering choices, like Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, Rihm’s music achieves a degree of indeterminacy by exploring the idea that form is provisional and dependent on circumstance. Put in more abstract (Adornian) terms, these scores attempt to combine (though without ‘reconciling’) identity and non-identity. As Rihm’s analogy between the search for form and the search for self suggests, neither the self nor the intersubjective social forms it inhabits are fixed; both can be reconfigured and both are more akin to processes than to fixed identities.

Stage works – and instrumental theatre Jakob Lenz Jakob Lenz (1978), a chamber opera in thirteen scenes, is central to Rihm’s preoccupation in the 1970s with linking the past to mental instability. Jakob Lenz, the historical figure (1751–92), was a poet, playwright and associate of Goethe, and he paved the way for the Sturm und Drang movement in the arts. The Lutheran pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin produced a diary of the nineteen days in 1778 that Lenz spent with him at his parsonage in the Alsace region, where the latter attempted to recover from his mental distress; and it was from this source that Georg Büchner wrote his novella Lenz, which was first published in 1839.74 This text was then adapted by Michael Fröhling to become the libretto for Rihm’s chamber opera Jakob Lenz, so that it is the Oberlin episode in Lenz’s life that forms the substance of this score. Rihm’s chamber opera has strong expressionist credentials, because Büchner was of course also the author of the play Woyzeck, from which Berg’s Wozzeck was derived. Moreover, Lenz wrote the play Die Soldaten, upon which Bernd Alois Zimmermann based his homonymous opera.75 Although this intricate lineage is a presence in the score, Rihm makes it clear that he understands the Lenz-character more as a cipher of mental destruction than as a historical figure.76

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The thirteen scenes of the opera chart Lenz’s descent from being an eccentric outsider to entering a state of psychosis. The main characters with whom he interacts are Oberlin and his former friend from literary circles Christoph Kaufmann. He also refers to Friederike Brion, with whom Goethe had broken off a relationship, but she is only represented by Lenz’s allusions to her. A more substantial presence in the score is a group of six vocalists who embody the voices inside Lenz’s head; they enter into dialogue with their host and even take possession of him. Directions in the score state that these voices are inaudible to other characters in the drama, and that they are to be understood as a portrayal of nature; musically, they also carry most of the historical allusions in the opera. The cast of nine voices plus two children is supported by an ensemble of eleven instrumentalists as follows: two oboes, one clarinet (B♭ and bass), one bassoon, one C trumpet, one trombone, one percussionist (eight instruments), one harpsichord and three cellos. From this somewhat unbalanced collection of instruments, Rihm produces sounds of almost orchestral proportions. The expressionist sound world of Rihm’s score and its preoccupation with states of mind are undoubtedly beholden to Schoenberg’s Erwartung, to Berg’s Wozzeck and to Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten – the latter also providing a precedent for its expanded stylistic palette. Roaming wider, it is evident from the very opening of Rihm’s score that is indebted to an AustroGerman practice – as represented by Schubert’s song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise – of conveying a fragmented inner subjectivity by means of a dialogue with nature; a nature that is conceived both as an extension of self and as something alien to self. This blend of nature and historical allusion appears in Scene 4 when the voices assume the role of working farmers, who accompany Lenz’s paranoia with a Ländler. In Scene 9, the voices (‘mountains?’, the stage instructions state) approach Lenz using stylized saraband steps that are accompanied by an appropriately quirky version of this dance form. Historical references take on a more ambigious role as well by adopting a style reminiscent of Bach’s choral writing from the cantatas and passions: in Scene 7, Lenz’s voices dog him with thoughts of his (unattainable) beloved Friederike; in Scene 11, they torment him with the thought that he should be dead, and prompt a suicide attempt. In both cases, the historically infused voices serve to confirm the protagonist’s sense of alienation, an idea Rihm was to explore further in Die Hamletmaschine. In general, Scene 7 provides a good example of Lenz’s varying musical and mental states. It opens in a pastoral idiom with Lenz at one with his natural surroundings, a mood the Bach-like voices initially join and then agitate by stating that loss is unavoidable, with the result that Lenz is

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overcome by distressing thoughts about Friederike. In the closing interlude, Lenz attains some relief from the anguish of his voices in the form of a quotation, which is labelled as such in the score, from Schumann’s Kinderszenen No. 12, ‘Kind im Einschlummern’ (‘Child Falling Asleep’), over which Rihm places two children’s voices. It is quite possible that this quotation served in Rihm’s mind to link Lenz’s childlike state with the mental deterioration that Schumann underwent towards the end of his life; dramatically the quotation renders Lenz as a helpless figure, in contrast to the idyllic simplicity he conveys at the opening of the scene. Rihm gives no indication that he was familiar with the reading of Büchner’s Lenz found in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s The AntiOedipus, which was published in 1972.77 Nevertheless, the contrast this text proposes between Lenz’s continuity with nature, as constituted by a mobile energy flow, and his experiences under the pastor’s care of being pinned down by a signifying regime is informative, because it provides a way of understanding how traditional materials in Rihm’s score switch from conveying authority to offering solace. From this perspective, it is possible to find in Rihm’s Lenz not only schizophrenia conveyed in the established sense as a form of subjectivity unable to interact with the world, but also schizophrenia experienced as a subjectivity loosened from the boundaries of self. In this way, Jakob Lenz explores on a larger scale the crossover between evocation and intensity proposed earlier in relation to the third song of the slightly later Neue Alexanderlieder. Nevertheless, it is schizophrenia in the established sense that prevails in Lenz’s disturbed repetition of the word ‘konsequent’ (‘logical’) towards the end of the score, his voice finally breaking on this word (Ex. 4.8) as the ensemble grinds through a layered semitone descent. It is not difficult to link Jakob Lenz to the Neue Alexanderlieder, but it is worth casting the net wider: although the opera was completed in 1978, Rihm worked on it in 1977, the year in which he composed Musik für drei Streicher. Both scores open with direct statements, featuring prominent semitones, of their respective chords, which in both cases permeate the subsequent music as structural material; indeed, the opening so-called ‘Lenz chord’ (pitch-class set 3–5 [0,1,6] F–G♭–B) is not far removed from the principal chord (pitch-class set 3–4 [0,1,5] E–F–A) of Musik für Drei Streicher. It is also possible that the descents at the end of the first movement of Musik für drei Streicher (bar 39) offer a motivic model for the moment of Lenz’s collapse in the final scene. Jakob Lenz’s stylistic range offers one of the most attractive aspects of this widely performed score, providing respite from its turbulent expressionism. Certainly, it was the conspicuous presence of tonal references that ensured

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Ex. 4.8 Rihm, Jakob Lenz, last scene, bars 79–81

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the opera featured in debates about whether its inclusive aesthetic represented a dead-end or an escape from the ivory tower of avant-gardism, to use HannsWerner Heister’s terminology.78 What attempts to categorize this score as an example of the ‘neu Einfachheit’ (new simplicity) missed, however, is that its historical allusions traverse a range of emotions, few of which are stable or reassuring. Jakob Lenz has received hundreds of performances since its 1979 premiere in Hamburg, making it one of the most successful European operas written within the time frame of this book.

Tutuguri Although Tutuguri: Poème dansé (1982) does not shake off the issue of historical reference, Rihm’s primary concern in this score is with the condition of music. Significantly, it marks the start of an ongoing engagement with the French surrealist actor and dramatist Antonin Artaud, who provided the inspiration for some of Rihm’s most experimental scores, including the stage works Die Eroberung von Mexico and Séraphin. Rihm named Tutuguri after the poem ‘Tutuguri’, subtitled ‘The Rite of the Black Sun’, from Artaud’s radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947). Artaud visited the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico in 1936 and was fascinated by their intoxicatory use of the Peyotl cactus. His ‘Tutuguri’ is a provocative rite in which the Cross is replaced by a huge horseshoe wet with human blood. Rihm’s score, which lasts nearly two hours, breaks down into two parts: the first comprises three scenes, and the second, scored for six percussionists and taped voices, just one scene. In addition to a large orchestra, Rihm calls for a taped choir and speaker, actually a screamer, vocal forces that reappear in Die Hamletmaschine and Die Eroberung von Mexico. The use of a taped choir is part of Rihm’s preoccupation in the 1980s with sound as a spatial object, as confirmed by a programme note which talks about ‘a music sculpture before us’. Moreover, the language is similar to that used in connection with the Chiffre scores, with Rihm writing about sound space, sound signs and the visible sound script. In the context of Tutuguri, however, these preoccupations take on a more atavistic dimension, with Rihm aiming to convey the raw, naked condition of music itself, adding: ‘It must become a cry.’79 And so it does, at the conclusion of the third scene, with the entry of the screaming man, where Rihm asks for five horrible screams, with the tongue out, adding that the whole body screams. Given Rihm’s ongoing interest in Artaud, it is worth noting that the latter’s Judgment of God played a formative role in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs. From Artaud, Deleuze and Guattari took the idea that the organism is an imposition on the body. Just as patterns

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of signification can be dissembled, they argued, so the organism can be disarticulated. Hence, if in his historically influenced scores Rihm reconstructs models of signification, in his Artaud-derived scores he disaggregates the body from the articulating functions of the organism.80 The limit he encounters is the same one that Derrida detects in Artaud: that it is not possible to convey the body without some sort of signifying mechanism.81 Rihm wants this to be music without context, that is, music without historical sediment. Nevertheless, there is one overwhelming context for a large, pagan dance score that uses extensive percussion and resorts to frequent ostinati: indeed, it is hard to experience Tutuguri without encountering the lingering presence of The Rite of Spring. However, Stravinsky’s score does not emerge unscathed from this association, because, unlike Stravinsky’s ‘Chosen One’, who has no voice, Rihm’s screaming man expresses his terror of the events that engulf him. As Seth Brodsky writes, in the context of Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky’s tour de force, ‘the music of Tutuguri spotlights Le Sacre’s eerie void of conflict, its battle of allagainst-none’.82 Ambiguously, Rihm’s screaming man occupies the space between a ritualized absence of self and, contra Artaud, the somatic self as the human subject’s final line of defence against a collective consciousness. Pragmatically, Rihm produced five separate scores of the various components of Tutuguri, as well as the Schwarzer und roter Tanz (1983) – a free-standing orchestral piece which is the most frequently performed of the Tutuguri pieces. With its fierce ostinati, Schwarzer und roter Tanz (1983) is derived from Part III of Tutuguri, omitting the screaming man and taking the material in some new directions (the ending resembles the ending of The Rite of Spring). The title evokes the red human flesh offered in the rite of the black sun, as conveyed by Artaud’s poem which reads as follows: ‘And there are six men, one for each sun, and a seventh man, who is the sun in the raw dressed in black and with red flesh.’83 This fierceness is immediately evident in music that opens by setting a shuddering figure on the violins against a rhythmic slapping in the basses. After finishing Tutuguri in 1982, Rihm intended to start work on Die Eroberung von Mexico. Instead of doing so, however, he became preoccupied with what became Die Hamletmaschine – probably because, by his own estimation, he was not yet able to take the interactions between Cortez and Montezuma beyond stereotypical formulations.84

Die Hamletmaschine By invoking horizons of the past and the present, Die Hamletmaschine (1986) harks back to the semiotic codes of Jakob Lenz, even though the

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ferocity of its pulverized subjectivity is more redolent of Tutuguri. A music theatre piece in five parts, Die Hamletmaschine is a modified setting of a text of the same name by the celebrated playwright Heiner Müller, who remained a citizen of East Germany until German reunification. Since the latter’s brand of experimental theatre is influenced by Artaud, Rihm’s attraction to it is not surprising.85 Furthermore, as mentioned in the discussion of Fremde Szenen, Rihm has acknowledged an affinity with the way Müller used existing texts to create new meanings. Müller’s Hamlet-figure is already split, but Rihm develops this dimension of the drama: Hamlet I is an old actor, who remembers playing the role; Hamlet II is an actor playing the part of Hamlet; and Hamlet III is a singer (baritone), who adds an operatic dimension to Hamlet’s state of mind.86 This division ensures that the mechanisms associated with presenting a character are prominent, as demonstrated when the Hamlet-actor refuses to play his role in Part IV. It also ensures that the Hamlet-persona is partitioned into irreconcilable parts. Ophelia is also a split character, or at least she becomes one when Part V deploys three Ophelia-doubles – a very high soprano, a soprano and a mezzo-soprano – to entwine around Ophelia’s voice, at once dispersing and extending it. The effect, however, is very different from that of the fractured Hamlet-figures, because even though Ophelia is vocally diffuse, she finds an acoustic mirror of herself in the other voices: her vocal expansion enjoys a fullness that the conflicting Hamlet signifiers will never achieve. Müller’s relationship to tradition is forcefully expressed in the following lines, which introduce his text: For thirty years Hamlet was for me an obsession, so I wrote a short text, Hamletmachine, with which I tried to destroy Hamlet. German history was another obsession, and I tried to destroy that obsession, too, that whole complex.87

Although Rihm’s heightened expressionism does justice to these sentiments, it pulls its punches a little in examining how we confront ghosts of the past, considering the burdens history places on us, and exploring the mechanics of performing particular roles. Even though the ‘ruins of Europe’ feature prominently in the stage sets of Part I, ‘Familienalbum’, as well as in the opening exchanges spoken by Hamlets I and II, Rihm puts the context more moderately than Müller, as follows: All this in front of the ‘ruins of Europe’ whose dust is still the best nourishment for anyone who wants to confront things or wants to know where we come from, where we are going; for whomever it is not enough that something functions, who – himself a machine – comes to terms with his own origins, his identity.88

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Notwithstanding this statement’s implied universalization of European values and problems, it casts the European canon in the ghostly role of a problematic father that poses continual challenges to the present. There is certainly no lack of cultural-historical reference in Die Hamletmaschine, with Ophelia and the three Hamlets alluding to various other Shakespearean roles. Musically, Part I carries the most historical references, with passages of Bach-like choral writing leading into the set piece of the fourth scene. This is an aria, adapted from Handel’s cantata Lucrezia, in which the Hamlet-singer articulates self-doubting words (while briefly assuming the identity of Richard III) that challenge the regal confidence of the music (see Ex. 4.9). In the context of the Handelian music, the line ‘OH MY PEOPLE WHAT HAVE I DONE UNTO THEE’ (set in English) suggests that a cultural history is being called to account for the present. The regal confidence of the music is undermined by the accompanying words, by falsetto passages, and by moments of expressionist paranoia. The final part of Die Hamletmaschine harks back to Tutuguri: it opens with three screaming men who subsequently ‘accompany’ Ophelia’s lines (or, rather, Elektra’s lines since Ophelia opens the scene with ‘Here speaks Elektra’) with sounds embodying a mixture of desire and control at their most atavistic, while two of these figures, dressed in doctors’ coats, attempt to envelop Ophelia in gauze bandages. Arguably, these men are linguistically pulverized versions of the three Hamlet-figures. The second scene offers something of an antidote to them as Ophelia’s voice becomes gradually absorbed into the sonorities of the three Ophelia-doubles, and then the female choir.89 The effect is of a diffuse presence, whereby Ophelia’s expanded vocality contrasts with her bleak withdrawal of her reproductive powers from the world – ‘I take back the world to which I gave birth.’90 Rihm’s own description of Act V speaks of ‘world as woman, female space’ and of ‘domination of space as woman’, adding that Ophelia transcends the mechanization of Hamlet. Indeed, it is striking that at the moment the Hamlet-figures are reduced to noise, Ophelia, who is trapped in bandages, gains access to an enhanced, immersed vocality. Her transcendence is, however, of limited consolation: she finishes the drama by singing: ‘When it walks through your bedrooms with butchers’ knives you will know the truth.’ These words provide confirmation, if any were needed, that Die Hamletmaschine’s engagement with the rubble of history, its overwriting of Müller’s overwriting of Shakespeare, manifests Rihm’s aesthetic of inclusivity at its fiercest. The year after completing Die Hamletmaschine, Rihm wrote Oedipus (1987) – another tormented piece of expressionist music theatre. He assembled the libretto from texts by Sophocles (translated by Hölderlin),

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Ex. 4.9 Rihm, Die Hamletmaschine, ‘Familienalbum’, Nr. 4, bars 10–15

Nietzsche and Müller. The immersed female vocality that is found in the concluding part of Die Hamletmaschine is immediately evident from the outset of Oedipus in the depiction of the Sphinx. Nevertheless, this kind of fluid writing is not a marked feature of a score that takes the

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Ex. 4.9 (cont.)

music-as-sculpture idea in the direction of the blocks of sound that are characteristic of Klangbeschreibung.

Die Eroberung von Mexico Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico, 1991) explores the relationship between self and other, whether expressed through the assertion

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of self, the loss of self, the discovery of self in relation to an environment, or the interaction of self with another person.91 Its libretto derives from four sources: Antonin Artaud’s plans for a Theatre of Cruelty show, also entitled The Conquest of Mexico (1933); the same author’s Séraphin’s Theatre (completed in Mexico, 1936); a poem dating from 1937 by the Latin-American author Octavio Paz entitled The Root of Man; and a poem, or song text, from the anonymous Aztec collection Cantares mexicanos that was originally written in Nahuatl and is thought to date from around 1523.92 Artaud’s version of the Spanish invasion does not provide a fully worked-out drama; instead, it offers scenes and atmospheres evoking the destruction of the Aztec civilization, as characterized through the relationship between Cortez (the Spanish commander) and Montezuma (the Aztec king). The structure of Rihm’s stage work is faithful to Artaud’s intentions, comprising four acts: ‘Die Vorzeichen’ (‘The Omens’), ‘Bekenntnis’ (‘Declaration’), ‘Die Umwälzungen’ (‘The Convulsions’) and ‘Die Abdankung’ (‘The Abdication’). Séraphin’s Theatre has the effect of relating the events and characteristics encountered to gendered categories of neutral, masculine and feminine (as does the casting of Montezuma as a soprano). The majority of the libretto (which Rihm reports he assembled in the process of composition) is gathered, in a mosaic-like fashion, from these two sources, with Artaud’s evocations becoming sung text. The Paz poem fits into this scheme simply by providing one stanza for each of the four acts, with the fourth one set as the final duet between Cortez and Montezuma. Cantares mexicanos is deployed more economically; nevertheless, its placing is significant, since it is set as a chorus, ‘Der Krieg würgt’ (‘The war chokes’), in the penultimate scene, ‘Verwüstung’ (‘Devastation’). In his wish ‘to develop the sculpture of the desired sound’, Rihm makes exacting requirements, which reveal the influence of Nono’s Prometeo, for the spatial distribution of the three ensembles.93 Ensembles 2 and 3 are visible in a shallow pit, occupying raked seating with the strings at the top, while ensemble 3 is placed slightly higher so that it spills onto the stage. These ensembles contain, in raised positions, the alto (group 2) and soprano (group 3) vocalists that are usually associated with Montezuma. Ensemble 1, meanwhile, is distributed around the remaining three sides of the auditorium that are not occupied by the stage, and the recorded sounds are also spatially dispersed. The result is that the audience inhabits, as it were, a space inside a melody. Rihm comments on this immersive vocality: Everything, even the smallest woodblock sound, is song. The sound structure is voice. My love for virtually monophonic music, for ‘polyphonic monody’, directs the search for a melos not restricted to the horizontal plane.94

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This sense of ‘polyphonic monody’ is embodied in the characterization of Montezuma by a soprano voice that is extended from the ensembles by a (very) high soprano and by a contralto. Rihm’s writing for Ophelia anticipates this type of scoring, but Montezuma’s expanded and dispersed vocality permeates the musical fabric in a way that exceeds the precedent for it found in Die Hamletmaschine. Articulating wordless syllables, the three voices wrap around one another and mingle with the ensembles, forming a seemingly fluid, pre-symbolic state of consciousness that is at one with its surroundings. Rihm reinforces this aspect when he comments, in a remark that evokes Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Grain of the Voice’, that ‘the whole machinery of linguistic mechanics (breath, throat, lingual, labial, etc.) lies over the instrumental sound like an acoustic film’.95 Although this drama is not principally historical, it is possible (like Rihm) to follow Tzvetan Todorov’s lead and to interpret its underlying conflict with reference to recorded events.96 Like most historians, Todorov asks why Montezuma chose not to fight the Spanish forces, since he knew of their presence at an early stage and could probably have defeated them at a strategic moment. His answer is that an Aztec world rooted in chronicles and omens deemed that an event could not take place unless it had been prophesied: fate was preordained rather than chosen. Because Montezuma was attuned to interpreting predictions, he was not equipped to deal with something as radically other as Cortez and his Spanish forces. Cortez, by contrast, was concerned not with what had been preordained, but with what would most effectively destroy the Aztec civilization. (Rihm picks up on this idea in ‘Die Vorzeichen’, when Cortez assimilates Montezuma’s sound world so as to install the idea of catastrophe in the king’s mind as an omen embedded in the natural order of things.) In this way, Todorov reads the encounter between Montezuma and Cortez as a collision between two different sign systems: as a clash in which the Spanish, who were experts in instrumental action, prevail over the Aztecs, who were situated in a particular world view. Articulating one of the major dilemmas of modernity, Todorov concludes: ‘By winning on one side, the Europeans lost on the other; by imposing their superiority on the whole country, they destroyed their own capacity to integrate themselves into the world.’97 The introduction to ‘Die Vorzeichen’ opens with drum rhythms conveying ‘the melody of a landscape that senses the approaching storm’.98 It serves to align Montezuma with the environment and to associate Cortez with an, as yet, indistinct threat. The two dimensions are placed side by side by locating the recorded female voices associated with Montezuma alongside the semiarticulate sounds of the two male speakers that are associated with Cortez. Together, these elements create the soundscape as an omen of things to come.

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The stage instructions require that Montezuma appears and disappears at various locations (such as bar 98) in the opening depictions of his realm, imbuing him with a phantom-like presence.99 His voice emerges from the embellished F♯ centre of the recorded female choir, expanding the registral space with an F♯ rising to C♯. The fifth generates little expectation; instead, it sounds merely empty, and is heard more as texture than as harmony. Montezuma’s lines become more articulated as his music is set to nature imagery taken from Artaud, as Ex. 4.10 demonstrates. Furthermore, they are gradually extended and resonated by the other two female vocalists, in Ex. 4.10 Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico, ‘Die Vorzeichen’, bars 277–85, vocal parts (and bowed ‘cymbales antiques’)

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places becoming almost indistinguishable from them in what might be called a super-voice. This combined voice, which Rihm frequently enhances with bowed ‘cymbales antiques’ (crotales), evokes a form of subjectivity that finds reflections of itself. Yet this subjectivity eschews rigid identity, because it is dispersed among the constituent voices. Cortez’s sonic presence is dissimilar to the fluid realm of Montezuma, because the undefined sounds of the two male speakers, who are situated between ensembles 2 and 3, do not intersect directly with Cortez’s vocality. Although the grunting speakers’ sounds have some affinity with the nonlinguistic utterances of the female voices and they too designate a level of pre-symbolic articulation, they do not evoke the state of plenitude that is conveyed by the female singers. Instead, they register pain at the demands of military discipline, and they signify not only an emergent subjectivity, but also a brutalized, damaged internal nature. They suggest that Cortez is ruled by social obligations, and that he becomes increasingly aware of the damage these restrictions inflict on himself and on those around him. In terms of colonized and the colonizer, Rihm’s estrangement of Cortez deprives the drama of a ‘normal’ mindset from which to observe Montezuma. From either perspective Cortez, too, is ‘other’. Todorov’s reading of the system of omens emerges in Cortez’s response to Montezuma’s invocation of nature, at which point the Spaniard turns the Aztec’s sonic imagery and lyric shapes into something more defined and threatening. This is Cortez’s impression of the sonic landscape evoked by Montezuma, and as his thoughts quickly turn to war, Montezuma immediately senses future disaster. Rihm does not treat the themes of masculine and feminine that he took from Séraphin’s Theatre as essential categories to be played out by the principal protagonists. Instead, he deals with them in terms of instrumental actions that lead to domination of the environment as opposed to situated perspectives that lead to co-operation with the environment. In ‘Die Umwälzungen’ the war is paralleled by the raging turmoil in Montezuma’s mind, described by Artaud as ‘The Zodiac, which’, he continues, ‘was roaring with all of its beasts in Montezuma’s head’. Montezuma’s already less-than-unified persona becomes further dispersed at this juncture by his bewilderment at events that seem to come from outside the system of omens. At this point Montezuma’s diffuse subjectivity that everywhere finds reflections of itself changes to a nexus of conflicting voices that are unable to comprehend the events in which they are immersed. Cortez also undergoes extreme disturbance: arriving too late to prevent a massacre (page 157), he brings forth a screaming man, perhaps a psychosis with a voice of its own, maybe even a staging of Artaud himself – certainly a

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manifestation of Cortez’s despair at the war. The appearance of this apparition leads to a passage for a range of male singers that combines syllabic articulation and words but dispenses with specified pitches. The screaming man – he who can only encounter social expectations as noise – has a short stage life, however, since he disappears into the paralysed body of Montezuma. This event is ambiguous: in one sense the screaming man forces Montezuma to become associated with the agony of dysfunctional values, but in another the screaming man seeks refuge in the representative of a cultural knowledge that is embedded in the physical world. The stage instructions for ‘Die Abdankung’, which follow Artaud’s intentions, indicate that Cortez also undergoes some sort of multiplication of self, as he dreams before a statue of Montezuma whose head has turned into music.100 The seemingly bizarre head-as-music idea suggests that after Montezuma disappears as a stage presence he lives on in the fabric of the score. It is also significant for understanding the most obvious feature of this section: that Cortez comes to occupy the musical characteristics that had hitherto been associated with Montezuma – the undulating melodic lines, the vocalized orchestration enhancing those lines, and the high soprano and contralto voices. (This transfer of musical place was clearly indicated in Frankfurt Opera’s 2002 revival of its 2001 production by the two female singers associated with Montezuma moving in ‘Die Abdankung’ to the stage space vacated by the two male speakers associated with Cortez.) Although Cortez finds a way of mingling with Montezuma’s sonic space, unlike the Hamlet figures in Rihm’s earlier music drama who remain detached from Ophelia’s vocality, he does not occupy this space comfortably, because he is obsessed with the idea of a dream that shatters its own illusion – perhaps a memory of the screaming man. Die Eroberung concludes with a mainly unaccompanied duet between Cortez and Montezuma, a setting of the final stanza of Paz’s poem, which in the last line speaks of ‘inexhaustible love streaming from death’. This new contrapuntal voice draws on Baroque and Renaissance vocal writing and deploys the triplet shapes of Cortez and Montezuma’s opening exchanges as a memory.101 The preceding three Paz verses, each of which also closes an act, belong to the extended vocal realm of Montezuma and share features such as the falling pattern used on ‘Liebe’ (‘love’) in each of the opening lines. This association persists in the fourth verse, with Cortez now a participant, in melodic strands that remain clear but wrap around each other in a way that ensures identity is neither imposed nor dissolved. Do the categories of masculine and feminine dissolve here, as Christina Zech has suggested, into a neutral state whereby Cortez and Montezuma achieve an androgynous overcoming of gendered categories?102 Does this

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scene represent an escape from the obligations of predefined categories? Or is it a shell of the form of communication with nature that Montezuma had once experienced? Some sort of convergence between the two characters is suggested by a diagram contained in Rihm’s sketches for this score which indicates that the two voices by now belong to one person: that is, together Cortez and Montezuma become Artaud.103 It could also be that the two characters stop looking for a guarantee of consistent experience and start looking instead towards each other, so as to create meaning intersubjectively. They do so, however, with a solemnity appropriate for words attesting to the underlying loneliness of death. Die Eroberung explores the realization that no sign system can be fully replete because none can find an external term to accomplish this completion. With the overlapping of landscape and female vocality in ‘Die Vorzeichen’, the musical material Cortez and Montezuma share only serves to demonstrate that their perceptions of themselves, of their environments and of each other are incompatible. This incomprehension is confirmed when the two characters meet in the next act, ‘Bekenntnis’. In ‘Die Umwälzungen’ both figures are driven to madness by the knowledge of inconsistencies in the sign systems they occupy. And, finally, in ‘Die Abdankung’ the two protagonists intersect in their search for a means of communication. Thus the fourth act is not a solution or resolution in any conventional sense; rather, it is an acknowledgement that the discontinuity between self and other represents an opportunity to (re)define self. Todorov’s topic –‘the discovery self makes of the other’, as he puts it – encourages us to understand the strangeness Rihm attributes to the characterizations of Cortez and Montezuma as, in part, the strangeness of self.104 It is significant that one of the ways in which this encounter takes place is through reference to older techniques. Although these procedures provide some security, they also create a certain remoteness, as if such interpersonal relations can only be modelled at an austere level that cannot find an outlet in contemporary life. For this reason, the work’s overall resistance to fixed identity is perhaps more significant than any message to be found in the formality of the closing message, the final duet. Put another way, Rihm’s score has managed both to retain and to embellish, in a musical language with its own aura, the combination of beauty and incomprehensibility that is characteristic of Artaud.

Séraphin Although Séraphin’s Theatre is not the central ingredient in Die Eroberung von Mexico, its inclusion in this score was clearly informative for Rihm, because his subsequent engagements with Artaud have taken the form of

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multiple encounters, linked by overlappings and reworkings, with this text. Artaud’s title is itself based on Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Séraphin’s Theatre’, which forms a major section of his The Poem of Hashish. Baudelaire’s subtitle alludes to a Parisian theatre of marionettes and magic lanterns that were associated with the figure of Joseph Séraphin, even though Baudelaire’s theatre of the mind is more about experiences of ordinary life under the influence of hashish than about theatrical tricks.105 In Artaud’s conception, the theatre of the mind became a theatre of the body, with the physiology of the lungs and breath a central component, in an attempt to find a direct form of utterance. In Rihm’s Séraphin pieces, Artaud’s words are not set; instead, when voices are used they deploy an extended array of phonetic and non-linguistic sounds. Séraphin, Versuch eines Theaters, Instrumente/Stimmen (1993–4) is a central component in this complex of scores. It exists in two states: the second (1996) reflects a realization in which the sequence and repetition of sections, along with some alterations in orchestration, differ from the first. The two versions of this multimedia score also manifest varying approaches to production: the 1994 version was performed alongside a video depicting human shapes, by Klaus von Bruch; the 1996 version was staged with theatrical scenes by Peter Mussbach. This diversity is in keeping with a certain indeterminacy built into the conception. As Ulrich Mosch puts the matter, ‘Séraphin is conceived as theatre with an “empty place”, which can be filled through images and/or scenic events. However, every moment need not be occupied.’106 The multidimensional way Rihm envisages the versions of Séraphin shows him developing ideas that were nascent in Die Eroberung von Mexico, through a desire to find a form of theatre that does not depend on action but is itself the action. In this context, he speaks of the ‘instrumental and vocal sounds as bodies’ as if they have become the dramatis personae, adding that the images are also a ‘person’, like the sounds and voices (two male and six female).107 The various dimensions such as sounds, voices and images can act alone and in combinations, where they can also mirror one another as doubles, as can the recordings of earlier states that appear in later states. The word ‘doubles’ is associated with what takes the form of an expanded vocality in other scores: the sound is enhanced through a mirror, but at the same time its centre is diffused. There is a precedent for this concept of ‘doubles’, which perhaps harks back to the shadow theatre idea of Baudelaire’s poem, in Artaud’s text. This means when I act, my scream stops turning on itself while it awakens its double in sources in the cave walls. The double is more than an echo, it is the memory of a language of which theatre has lost the secret.108

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More than Artaud intended, this writing evokes surplus and lack simultaneously: it cannot exclude the idea of duplication as an echo (that is, as something weaker), and yet it wants the copy to summon the memory of something more powerful. The potency of this ambiguity is not lost on Rihm’s musical embodiment of doubles. Moreover, doubles are found not just within scores but also between them, because the Séraphin idea has led to rhizome-like abundance, whereby instead of following an orderly chain of derivation, scores are better understood as offshoots of one another.109 Séraphin already carries, in the form of taped sections, traces of an earlier score, Étude pour Séraphin, for brass and percussion (1992). In addition, Mosch has listed another eleven scores with some form of derivation from these sources, making a total of fourteen.110 Séraphin/Stimmen, for six female voices and six woodblocks (1996), for example, extracts the female vocal writing from Séraphin to form a ‘madrigal’ in its own right. In this case, we find not the intertwined lines of an expanded female vocality, but a harmonic emphasis, with sections punctuated by the claves. In the first half, this takes the form of a rhythmically jagged homophony; in the second half, it manifests itself in slower music, creating a more layered and luminous harmonic effect. The chronology of Étude d’après Séraphin (1997), for instrumental and electronic sounds, is rather more convoluted. As already noted, Séraphin contains recorded sections of Étude pour Séraphin, and then a recording of Séraphin itself became a stratum in Séraphin-Spuren. This, in its turn, was recorded and became part of the tape layer that is associated with Strophe 5 of the live instrumental stratum in Étude d’après Séraphin, to which Rihm added a live ensemble of four trombones, two harps, two double basses and three percussionists. Small wonder, then, that Rihm suggests the piece should be subtitled ‘Levels of Memory’, or that he should comment that, ‘the Séraphin compositions are created like sediments in time’. He enriches this context when he describes Étude d’après Séraphin as one of his ‘anamnesiac’ compositions, in the sense that it attempts to ‘enter into instinctive, atavistic regions’. Thus this music attempts to access traces not only of its previous states – as suggested by Rihm’s attachment to the idea of the shadow theatre that informs Baudelaire and Artaud – but also of something more primal.111 The low, metallic harp sounds with which the piece opens leave one in no doubt as to what Rihm is speaking about; an impression that is only confirmed by the full, low brass sounds that were produced by electronic transposition. The score was commissioned by the Karlsruhe Centre for Art and Media Technology, and was produced with the aid of the facilities and staff there. One of Rihm’s few excursions into the studio, it uses electronic media to build on the notion of the double as sonic expansion of the original.

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The word ‘Spur’ (trace) that Rihm uses frequently in connection with the Séraphin pieces, not least in the title Séraphin-Spuren, is easily linked to the word ‘Chiffre’ that occurs so frequently earlier in his career. For even though levels of memory and processes of historical sedimentation have their own connotations, they are also another way of talking about music as signs. Furthermore, it does not stretch credibility to associate the notion of ‘Übermalung’, a term that locates the Séraphin scores as contemporaries of the fleuve cycle, with the idea of a trace. Indeed, the concept of composing new music over the trace of an existing recording is a form of technically mediated ‘Übermalung’. Thus the Séraphin pieces open up an interaction between instinct and memory, revealing the self as a negotiation between different types of experience, and exploring the interaction between essence and representation. In addition to the fourteen Séraphin-derived scores mentioned above, the Séraphin idea has continued to proliferate in Rihm’s oeuvre. Séraphin III (2007), which picks up threads from the 1994/6 scores, is subtitled ‘Jan Fabre: I am a Mistake’. A substantial ensemble piece, Séraphin III in this manifestation intersects with text, scenography and choreography by the Belgian performance artist Jan Fabre. The ‘mistake’ in question is the habit of smoking, and the original production certainly included plenty of that; more generally, the ‘mistake’ is the commonplace judgement of a life that is unfettered by social conventions. Concerto ‘Séraphin’ (2008) also draws on the original Séraphin scores, and, like many of the offshoots, it is not a stage work in any conventional sense. It is better described as instrumental theatre that responds to Artaud through the idea of using instrumentalists as dramatis personae. Scored for large ensemble, this score lasts nearly an hour and resembles aspects of the motion found in Jagden und Formen; most of the instrumentalists feature in soloistic combinations, with a notable piano duet and closing ‘wonky’ horn duet.

Discourses In addition to an expansive output of over 400 scores, Rihm has produced a steady stream of essays, interviews and programme notes, which extend to nearly 900 pages in Ausgesprochen, his collected writings. Even though he frequently expresses irritation at writing programme notes, and asks audiences to listen to his music without preconceptions, Rihm is clearly comfortable in the medium of language; indeed, his words stick to his music remarkably well, to the extent that it is often hard to hear it in any way other than the one indicated. As might be expected from a composer so attuned to musical semiotics, it is the discourses of music more than technical issues

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that he engages in his writings. Together, the words and the music constitute a major cultural force at the end of the twentieth century. Rihm makes problematic any easy distinction between modernism and postmodernism, because he offers not a wholesale rejection of modernism but an enrichment of it. Rihm emerged in 1974 from an environment of high modernism, and his emphasis on subjectivity and inclusivity challenged the constructivist values of this legacy. It was not surprising, therefore, that Rihm – along with other so-called neo-Romantic composers of the time such as Manfred Trojahn and Wolfgang von Schweinitz – featured in German debates on postmodernism in music. During the 1970s, however, the term used in such discussions was not ‘postmodernism’, which did not achieve currency in Germany until the 1980s, but the ‘neue Einfachheit’ (new simplicity). Evoking American minimalism, this designation suggested that the emergent aesthetic marked a return to tonal security, and thereby missed the double coding that is so characteristic of Rihm’s music. Not surprisingly, Rihm rejected the label, which has now fallen out of usage.112 His dismissal of the category of ‘postmodernism’ is, however, less convincing, because his music intersects with issues that are very much part of the postmodernism debate. Nevertheless, his wish not to be linked to postmodernism is understandable, given the neo-conservative associations that Habermas’s interpretation of the word generated in Germany.113 Anyway, Rihm’s interest in modernism became increasingly evident during the 1980s, and at the same time the intersections between modernism and postmodernism became more apparent as discussions advanced, with Hermann Danuser speaking of ‘postmodernism as the modernism of the present’.114 These connections indicate that Rihm’s inclusive aesthetic is more advantageously seen as an expansion of a previous generation’s concerns – as his tributes to Stockhausen and Lachenmann suggest – than as a negation of them.115 Rihm’s engagement with tradition has little to do with neo-classical reworkings of existing scores; indeed, Rihm links neo-classicism with serialist composition, and regards them both as essentially conservative.116 Nor is it principally nostalgic, since it explores the strangeness of the past as much as its familiarity. It might be heard as deconstructive to the extent that established gestures are soften detached from their standard contexts. Yet it goes beyond a process of unpicking, because the abundance of, say, Schumann’s gestures is used as a source of energy. Likewise, it eschews the irony that is sometimes associated with Kagel since materials are deployed with serious emotional investment. Indeed, Rihm is anxious to convey that his music is neither characterized by pluralism nor beholden to the aesthetic of collage – a term that is associated with the music of Bernd Alois

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Zimmermann.117 In short, a stereotyped postmodernist surface of unmoored simulacra, referring to nothing but one another, is not to be found here. Rihm’s preferred term is ‘inclusivity’, as described in ‘Der geschockte Komponist’, which was delivered at the Darmstadt summer course in 1978 – the year in which Musik für drei Streicher was premiered. In this essay, Rihm draws distinctions between ‘inclusive’ and ‘exclusive’ approaches to composition as part of a strategy of pulling away from the values of a previous generation. Taking a somewhat polemical stance, he characterizes ‘exclusive’ composition as attempting to reach a kernel through ever deeper purification. By contrast, he portrays ‘inclusive’ composition in wide-ranging terms, as follows: first, the bringing together and connecting of heterogeneous elements; second, the openness to external influences, which are not rationalized away; and third, the possibility of working through the ‘crisis-impulse’, without having to ignore the notches of injury anymore.118 The last of these criteria is especially interesting, because it calls for direct personal commitment from the composer. The allusions in Rihm’s music stem more from memories and impressions, from attempts to capture the character and gestures of established repertoire, than from systematic referencing. Rihm conveys this attitude when, in writing about Erscheinung, he comments that it ‘quotes not the sounds but the intonation of Schubert’.119 He adds more substance to this perspective in a passing remark on Dis-Kontur: ‘I never quote literally, always filtered and assimilated. Even the intonation, which one can indeed quote, has come first through my larynx and lips before it makes itself recognizable as a “brought in” (hereingefallener) tone.’120 Rihm’s insistence on the way he shapes existing material is compatible with a typically bold statement he makes elsewhere: ‘Tradition can only ever be my tradition.’121 Like many of his comments, this thought is simultaneously interesting and problematic. It is interesting because it suggests that music from the past can be prized away from established meanings, so that it becomes susceptible to reinterpretation; and it is problematic because it implies that Rihm, the composer, imprints a core identity on any material he encounters, whatever its hermeneutic associations. However, even if this tension between the immediacy of intuition and the mediation of consciousness by history is more intractable than Rihm suggests, it is still a productive conflict which pulls his creative energies in different directions. Because tradition neither constrains Rihm nor offers him security, he is fully prepared to bring traditional gestures into contact with a very different aesthetic, as the following description of what he considers to be musical freedom makes clear.

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And if I recall the unfettered imagination in Beethoven’s late quartets and quickly leap to Edgard Varèse’s sculpturally direct discovery of sound and sound-objects, then I have indicated an aesthetic of freedom through concrete musical means, which I am able to describe as the strongest influence on my own work.122

The recontextualization of sound Rihm envisages in these words, through an unlikely juxtaposition of cultural and tactile associations, is a continual theme in his work. Arguably, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, from which the above quotation was taken, is Rihm’s most important free-standing essay. Dating from 1983, which coincides with the earlier Chiffre pieces and work on Die Hamletmaschine, it reflects on achievements from the 1970s and indicates the emerging preoccupations of the 1980s. In comments that extend beyond the context of 1983, Rihm talks of ‘free prose’, which he explains as: ‘music that renews itself in every moment – really Debussy’s ideal – music whose course lies in its own energy, which the composer tracks down in musical objects and sets free’.123 Elaborating on this idea, he writes in two ways about events as cells: first, as closed units which, because they are not disposed to development, can be placed as disconnected elements in space; second, as cores, or germs, which can be set free in development.124 Although Rihm is talking here of musical events at a localized level, he also claims in less precise terms that such processes arise simultaneously with the conception of the whole form.125 At any rate, there are clear parallels between Rihm’s classification and the distinction Boulez makes between complex blocks, which require simple external organization, and simple material, which can be developed in complex ways.126 Even though Rihm’s tactile approach to musical material is very different from Boulez’s aesthetic of post-serial multiplication, the former’s understanding of the dialogue between form and individual moments owes much to post-war high modernism. This context is acknowledged when Rihm continues his discussion by again mentioning Stockhausen’s Moment-form, and what he calls the ‘interchangeability of parts’ (‘Vertauschbarkeit der Teile’) in Boulez, in a phrase that may well allude to Boulez’s experimentation with open form in the Third Piano Sonata, and to the legacy of this approach to mobility in his subsequent scores.127 More surprising, perhaps, are Rihm’s comments on John Cage. As someone strongly associated with musical subjectivity, one might expect Rihm to be antithetical to a composer who, at one stage anyway, tried to erase his own subjectivity from music. However, Rihm sidesteps this issue when he states that for him Cage annulled the traditional aesthetic of coherence in

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the most convincing manner.128 This reading may well say more about Rihm than Cage, because the break with the aesthetic of coherence enables the subjectivities of the past to be deployed as a semiotic network. Of course, one of the key ingredients that enables Rihm to do this is his fascination with the moment, and so it is no surprise that he values the way Cage released the individual event.129 By making connections with Debussy, Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen, Rihm indicates that his encounters with traditional forms, and indeed tonal harmony, are filtered by modernist associations. Indeed, it is his ability to mix classical and avant-garde traditions, sometimes in close proximity, that makes him so distinctive. This mingling is possible because Rihm’s emphasis is more on how the moment passes than on the material contained in a moment, and because he wants to capture the immediacy of the moment without sacrificing its potential to associate with other moments and thereby create a larger form. Alongside such flexibility is Rihm’s desire to talk about, and convey, the condition of music – a concern that is particularly prevalent in the scores inspired by Artaud. This matter is addressed when, in 1978, he comments: ‘It becomes ever clearer to me that I do not compose by disposition, but that I express situations of music itself, when I write something down.’130 Problematically, this statement seems to envisage music as a kind of underlying condition, or state, that is somehow more fundamental than our experiences of it as a medium that contributes to the formation of subjectivity in a variety of ways. This dilemma emerges when Rihm provides a substantial quotation, concerning the potential for postlinguistic music, from Adorno’s essay ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’. In the larger context, Adorno contends that, as music moves away from its language-character (its associated meanings and gestures), so its intentionless essence emerges; but at the same time ‘music’s own characters, which developed alongside language’, cannot simply be discarded because it is impossible to remove music from its history in order to discover its pure form.131 Rihm’s purpose in using the quotation is to align himself with Adorno’s critique of subjectless objectivity in music. Nevertheless, the larger tension that Adorno outlines, which relates to the problem of ‘my tradition’, is one that Rihm continually faces: he tries to push beyond linguistic limitations to something more essential, and yet he virtuosically yields new meanings from historical material by deploying it as a sign system. However, the apparent vacillation is productive, not a personal failing, because it is doubtful whether it is possible, or even desirable, to resolve this dialectic. The closest Rihm comes to doing so, even though it ultimately only relocates the problem, is when he relates the aesthetic of inwardness,

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with all its historical associations, to the interior of the body, invoking the physiological sense of an inner tension.132 This interplay between what we might call music as a state and music as a signifying process suggests that one can think of self simultaneously as an inner state and as something susceptible to outside influences, yet without being able to say where one stops and the other begins. This chapter has argued that Rihm’s music is productively understood as a sign system that refers not only to the Western art music tradition but also to Rihm’s own scores. Although it is, of course, not unusual to find linkage between scores in a composer’s output, what distinguishes Rihm in this regard is the extent to which this aspect is actively engaged. One score will continue and develop an idea that emerges in another, with such connections explicit in the Chiffre and fleuve cycles to the extent that double bar lines become a somewhat provisional boundary between one configuration and the next. Beyond this intertextuality within his oeuvre, Rihm sometimes makes sign systems – even incompatible ones – the very topic of his creativity, as Die Eroberung von Mexico demonstrates. A predilection for sign systems is perhaps not surprising, given that Rihm emerged at about the time that post-structuralism became a presence on the academic horizon. His acquaintance with this way of thinking is evident when he talks about music as ‘the other’, as mentioned in the discussion of Fremde Szenen. Furthermore, it is likely that Rihm’s friendship with the influential philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has enhanced his familiarity with this body of ideas, even if only in a general way that has allowed him to pursue his own ends.133 As already indicated, there are certainly parallels to be drawn between Rihm’s ways of thinking and ideas developed by Deleuze and Guattari. One example would be his capacity to detach the energy flows of classical music from their established signifying regimes. Furthermore, the idea of the rhizome as a signifying chain is helpful for understanding the way Rihm proliferates material between scores so that it does not culminate in a final state.134 His post-structuralist tendencies notwithstanding, Rihm is plausible when he distances himself from the idea of ‘music about music’,135 and by corollary, the idea of signs about signs, because there is a critical dimension to his notion of multiplicity, which is illuminated by what Andrew Bowie has to say about intertextuality: It is the reconfiguration of existing linguistic elements to release new semantic potential, or to destroy existing meanings, that makes literature a vital fact in the self-understanding of modernity, not the fact that all texts are parasitic upon other already existing texts.136

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If the word ‘music’ is substituted for ‘literature’ in this quotation, then it works equally well for understanding the ways that Rihm responds to existing music, and for conveying the ways that he breaks down and restores his own earlier pieces in a score such as Jagden und Formen. This understanding of intertextuality also becomes a rather effective vehicle for relating Rihm’s sign systems to the discourses of modernity. From the perspective of modernity, Rihm’s music explores an environment in which binding traditions have dissolved, or in which music has lost its language-character, to use Adorno’s terminology. In these conditions, form trades security for insight: like self, it becomes more provisional, more self-reflective and more liable to change. As Rihm puts it, ‘the work is the search for the work’.137

5 Contemporaries of Lachenmann and Rihm: the younger generation

This chapter is cast in three sections: the first examines contemporaries of Lachenmann under the heading ‘refusal of habit’, and the second considers contemporaries of Rihm under the heading ‘historical reflection’. The intention is to connect discussion to major ideas associated with these two central figures, without claiming that they controlled what happened around them. Finally, the third section addresses a group of four composers from the younger generation, and investigates how they have responded to and departed from major themes in the volume.

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Nicolaus A. Huber (b. 1939) studied with Nono, like Lachenmann – who has commented that ‘Huber is the composer closest to me’.1 Drawing on the title of Huber’s Traummechanik, for piano and percussion (1967), in a portrait from 1987, Lachenmann characterizes Huber as a ‘dreamer and a mechanic’, which is a way of saying that, like himself, Huber breaks the magic by means of mechanical procedures in order to release something unexpected.2 The central tenet of Huber’s essay ‘Critical Composition’ (1972) is certainly very close to Lachenmann’s sentiments: ‘critical composition nowadays means analytical composition that not only produces music but can also reveal information about music. New music says something about music.’3 Huber is strongly associated with the spirit of 1968 and is one of the most politically outspoken composers considered in this book, as demonstrated by two scores in particular: Versuch über Sprache and Harakiri. Scored for sixteen solo voices, Chinese cymbals, Hammond organ, double bass and two-channel tape, Versuch über Sprache (Essay on Language, 1969) is written on graph paper, to which some drawn-in staves have been added. Like Lachenmann’s temA, it places emphasis on the physical mechanisms of producing phonetic sounds; and like his Kontrakadenz, it includes noises that are associated with broadcasting, in this case from taped TVs rather than radios, with more attention paid to interference than to programme content. A text by Hölderlin, for example, is accompanied by the sound

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associated with a blurred picture on a TV. Versuch comprises sustained blocks of sound that are strongly characterized in terms of dynamics, and these alternate with tape sonorities that include sine tones, the buzzing of a TV set, white noise and the humming of a loudspeaker – achieved by the contact of a screwdriver with an amplifier input. The piece also contains a statement, to be read without compassion by female voice, that associates breathing with emotions and which concludes with the sentiment that ‘speech manipulates music’. The overall aim would appear to be an exploration of the sonic relations between speech and music as a way of moving away from the standard, bourgeois, ways of discussing music. The result has some of the collage characteristics of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem für einen jungen Dichter, even if Huber’s approach is more evocative of channel hopping, and it shares with this score a low-tech approach to the use of tape. The ethos of Versuch is far removed from that of Stockhausen’s attempts to blend electronic sounds and speech, because its juxtapositions and superimpositions are hostile to doctrines of coherence, whether conveyed through tonal or serial doctrines of organicism. Versuch über Sprache won second prize in the inaugural composition competition at the 1970 Darmstadt course – a not entirely complimentary judgement since the first prize was withheld at an event that was marked by controversy.4 The title of Harakiri, for small orchestra and tape (1971), is taken from a well-known Japanese word for ritual suicide by disembowelment with a sword; the piece was premiered by an ad hoc orchestra at the Darmstadt summer course of 1972, where it created a stir in a year that was dominated by the issue of music and politics. Like Versuch über Sprache, it uses long durations and tape, but in this case the writing is for instruments rather than voices. The score, which is divided into temporal spans, is only eight pages (mainly graphics on blank paper, with bits of manuscript written in); and this sparsity is reflected in the music, most of which consists of isolated sonorities that are sustained for several minutes, and that are generally extremely quiet. In the opening statement, thirteen violins play a unison G♭ for two minutes, one that is achieved by tuning the A string over two octaves below its normal pitch so that it becomes slack; this passage is marked ppp and the players are asked to concentrate as hard as possible. A low dynamic is maintained until the section from 90 50″ to 110 5″, where there is a sustained crescendo in the violins (from ‘ppp to ffff possible’), which is joined for the last four seconds by a loud, powerful thunder clap from the loudspeaker. After an eight-second pause, the thunder is followed by the sound of nearly a minute of heavy rain falling on a resonant metal roof, the composer calling for a ‘ringing, sharp sound colour’. The last two

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minutes of the score consist of a speech for a female voice that ends with the words: ‘Crescendi are not value-free/Music conceals their danger,/mystifies their use./One should no longer, under the cover of structure, make a display of crescendi, which are only themselves.’5 This speech indicates that the intention of the piece is to challenge or, as its title suggests, to destroy the expressive associations that crescendi and decrescendi carry with them. In keeping with this aim, the long crescendo in the violins is not supported by the sorts of musical features that would create a climax, and it is not linked to the subsequent thunder clap – thus it lacks emotional force. Equally, the opening instruction to avoid any unnecessary movement that could even slightly disturb concentration is a request not for a parody of spirituality, but for the musicians to focus on the sounds in a way that might dissolve pre-established modes of listening. The score stands at an interesting junction for, despite sharing with serialism a mistrust of subjective expression, it directly challenges serialism’s formalist principles by indicating that musical structure carries ideological content. Such an extreme score is likely to function as a transition to something else, because its point can only be made a limited number of times. What could not be predicted, however, was that only a couple of years after its premiere, Rihm would emerge with a strong endorsement of subjective expression. Appropriately, the impact of Harakiri extended beyond its own internal procedures. It was commissioned by Clytus Gottwald, who was then new music producer at the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart, to be premiered in 1972. However, when Huber delivered the score, Gottwald cancelled the performance on the grounds that the composer had not fulfilled the commission. Subsequently, a lengthy dialogue ensued between the two protagonists and interested parties, which eventually appeared in edited form in the new music journal Melos, as did subsequent letters from Gottwald and Huber.6 Gottwald’s basic point is that Harakiri is not about the difficulty of socially aware composition, but instead amounts to an avoidance of the problem. In order to demonstrate that he did not always shy away from risk, he added that he had scheduled a performance of Lachenmann’s Kontrakadenz; and in a later letter, he positions Lachenmann as Huber’s antipode on the basis that he strives to articulate social contradictions instead of prematurely suspending work. (Gottwald did, however, experience Lachenmann’s appetite for polemic when he subsequently chaired the first round of the Lachenmann–Henze dispute.) Huber responded that he was ‘proud to have developed a new function for the length of sound’ and that compositional problems are social problems.7 For him, therefore, Gottwald did not understand fully the aim of trying to politicize music by suspending its traditional categories.8 Despite the animosity of this

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exchange, Huber and Gottwald managed to generate a debate of genuine interest; and it is to Gottwald’s credit that he sought to defend his decision other than by means of a bland assertion of power. Huber’s antipathy to bourgeois conventions does not make him an obvious candidate for engaging with the past. Nevertheless, Schumann has proved to be a resource for him, as for many other composers, even though he has continued to hold expressive formulae at arm’s length. Since his Daruabukka, for piano (1976), Huber has pursued a ‘technique in which the rhythm, standing out in the foreground, influences and determines all other musical phenomena’;9 and this is undoubtedly one of the factors that ensures Huber’s response to Schumann is idiosyncratic. Demijour (1986) is scored for oboe, cello and piano; its French title translates as ‘Zwielicht’ in German (meaning ‘twilight’), the title of a song from Schumann’s Eichendorff settings in his Op. 39 Liederkreis (although the song is about dawn not dusk). Written only a couple of years after Rihm’s Fremde Szenen were finished, this is also a piano trio of sorts, with an oboe replacing the standard violin. Huber writes of twilight: ‘Illumination by two different light sources. Confusion of the eye’s perception of colour.’ And commenting directly on Schumann’s setting, he states: ‘the dusk-like undecidedness coagulates into human relationship situations, which carry in themselves the threat of some catastrophic turning point’, as illustrated by the song’s advice not to trust a friend in this hour.10 Although somewhat cryptic, this remark refers to the way Schumann’s song moves between the hazy inwardness of the dawn, which is associated with spread-chord quaver motion, and the abruptness of awakening, which is linked to block-chord quaver motion. Despite this sensitivity towards Schumann’s song, instead of alluding directly to its sound Huber uses elements from it in unfamiliar ways. The most notable of these aspects is Schumann and Eichendorff’s concluding warning, ‘hüte dich, sei wach und munter!’ (‘beware, be awake and alert!’), as shown in Ex. 5.1a. From this he takes the falling motif, the repeated notes and the eight syllables, placing them in various groupings and subgroupings. On the opening page, for example, the cello articulates the three syllables of ‘hüte dich’ in various durations on a repeated note (see Ex. 5.1b). From initial impressions, there is little in this music to indicate an affinity with Schumann’s depiction of twilight and inwardness. With the programme note, though, it is possible to find in Demijour a recasting of Schumann’s portrait of internal and external states, because the glissandi, the stepwise motion and the pulsing patterns all occur in what might be called hazy or aggressive formulations that suggest drowsiness and awakeness, as well as transitions between the two states. Thus something of the transience of Schumann’s song is retained, even though Huber does not

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Ex. 5.1a Schumann, Liederkreis Op. 39, ‘Zwielicht’, last five bars

Ex. 5.1b Nicolaus A. Huber, Demijour, bars 1–10

allude to its semiotic conventions in the way one might expect from Killmayer or Rihm. Indeed, it is possible that the piece offers a reflection on Killmayer, for whom contrasting the inner voice of the self with an outer voice of obligations is a central concern, by letting the two states unsettle each other through the idea of twilight. As mentioned in the section on Killmayer in Chapter 2 (and considered again in the Epilogue), the renewed interest in Schumann ran alongside a preoccupation with Hölderlin, a parallel that was not lost on Huber. An Hölderlins Umnachtung for chamber ensemble (To Hölderlin’s Derangement, 1992) explores not so much the sanctuary of the poet’s inner vision, but his state of madness and the social pressures that induced it. The title alone indicates an interesting orientation, since it subverts the format of a dedication by being addressed to a mental state. Accordingly, the piece attempts to show ‘what insanity, what living and working in Hölderlin’s tower in Tübingen, was like’.11 In his note on the work

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Huber quotes from two first-hand accounts of Hölderlin’s mental state. Furthermore, near the conclusion of the score he gives instructions for text to be read over a bass drum roll, first the words ‘I am completely departed’, and second a longer statement, in an altered voice, adapted from Ulrich Häussermann’s volume of 1961 on Hölderlin: It is a prolonged death. The individual layers of his personality come apart. The brilliant level proceeds to float, loses its centripetal connection. The mental and corporeal matter remains behind, bewildered and directionless. Reason no longer coheres, breaks asunder. His life is a fully internal one.12

These sentiments are followed by what Huber calls an ‘acoustic portrait’, whereby the performers are asked to draw audibly with pencil on paper. As a template for this moment, the score provides a reproduction of J. G. Schreiner’s drawing of Hölderlin aged fifty-five, followed by two examples of versions that the instrumentalists might produce. Huber asks them to produce rapid cross-hatchings in order to create an ‘acoustic translation’, the idea being that the action of drawing produces an acoustic result analogous to Hölderlin’s state of mind. It is a concept that is prepared by means of drawing with pencils as part of the sonic field earlier in the score. In contrast to the Romantic inner vision many recent composers (notably Killmayer) have sought by setting Hölderlin, Huber concludes that ‘An Hölderlins Umnachtung signifies the opposite to poetic cosiness’ (Gemütlichkeit),13 which is a way of saying he is dealing with the outward manifestations of Hölderlin’s inwardness. For the composer, there is a connection between the way instruments and gestures are separated from their ‘normal’ contexts in the piece and Hölderlin’s creative derangement. An example of such a procedure is the way the piano strings are not just plucked but given a new perspective by being placed in a wider spectrum of plucked sonorities. If Huber maintains some distance from the idea of inwardness, he is also critical of the postmodernist antithesis: empty signs. In an essay from 1995 on Beds and Brackets for piano and open doors/windows or tape (1990), he responds to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the depthless simulacrum, particularly in relation to the associated idea of the disappearance of history. In contrast to this perspective, he argues that in this score, ‘the listener is, as it were, connected to the bodies of the player and the instrument. Both have their histories.’14 At the end of the piece, however, this proximity is challenged, in a manner that suggests the influence of Cage’s Variations IV, by opening the doors and windows of the performance space (or by using a tape) to let in environmental sounds. Since Huber expects these noises to emanate from recognizable sources such as passing cars or children playing,

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Fig. 4 Photograph of Nicolaus A. Huber.

presumably these sounds are also intended to serve as a corrective to Baudrillard’s system of depthless signs. More generally, though, the mere act of opening windows serves to draw attention to the way in which aesthetic autonomy is defined by the institution of a concert hall, in a manner congruent with Peter Bürger’s understanding of the avantgarde.15 Nevertheless, it is not just bourgeois practices that receive attention from this composer. For when 1990s pop music is blasted into the auditorium during Rose Selavy (2000), the gesture is as critical of the culture industry as it is of the conventions of autonomy. The general approach is well summarized by Hannes Seidl, who has commented: ‘He finds sounds and structures that make societal mechanisms perceptible.’16

Spahlinger Lachenmann places Mathias Spahlinger (b. 1944), like Huber, in the same category as himself: a critical search for lost magic.17 However, Spahlinger is far from being an imitator of either Huber or Lachenmann, even though he has written about both composers. He has argued, in a slightly critical tone, that ‘musique concrète instrumentale’ reinvents the framework of tension and release, a major feature of tonal music, for non-tonal music. But he is withering about the epigones of this technique, maintaining that ‘the highpressure bowing that once intended to represent the labour of its execution has become the tristan chord of the twentieth century’.18 If Spahlinger is not a dogmatic follower of Lachenmann, he too continues the legacy of 1968 in

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the sense that he believes that dismantling the illusory language-character of music is a process of ideology critique. Spahlinger’s 128 erfüllte augenblicke, for soprano, clarinet and cello (128 fulfilled moments, 1975) allows performers to choose how many of the 128 moments to use, the order in which they are to be placed and the number of times they are played or repeated. Each instant explores what the composer specifies as three dimensions: the range of different pitches, the range of durations and the range between definite pitches and noise. In order to locate moments in his scheme, Spahlinger provides all of them with a threedigit code and prints each one on a separate page. Moreover, they all exist in a < version and a > version, as a way of showing that one is an adaptation of the other. Augenblicke .121< and .121>, for example, share the same pitches and exhibit similar dynamics, but offer different duration profiles (see Ex. 5.2). More generally, the score demonstrates a concern with musical dynamics, and it features middle C and the D above it prominently in many of its moments, as is the case in Ex. 5.2. The score’s various protocols generate an underlying contradiction: the instants articulate a series of fine-grained transitions, but the Ex. 5.2 Mathias Spahlinger, .121< and .121> from 128 erfüllte augenblicke

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performers are not obliged to preserve these in the succession and number of moments they choose. Nevertheless, a performance of this score constitutes a negotiation between freedom and restraint, because even though the composer has relinquished some authority by providing the performers with an interpretive task, he has also asserted control over their decisions by using procedures that resist tonal habits.19 Furioso, for ensemble (1992) was premiered at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. The score includes a quotation from paragraph 589 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Universal freedom, therefore, can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of disappearance.’ It also quotes from Georg Büchner’s Dantons Tod: ‘we are the people, and we will the end of law’.20 Since Hegel’s sentence forms part of his negative assessment of the French Revolution, its presence is presumably designed to counter the mob mentality of the Büchner quotation. Nevertheless, Spahlinger seems to have seized on the evocative wording ‘fury of disappearance’ (a phrase that appears to combine conflicting ideas) as a compositional idea whereby later events negate their precursors. Indeed, he has even suggested a theatrical application of this idea, according to which, were it not for the potential disruption, ‘the musicians, each at their own tempo, could be drawn across the stage on podiums on wheels so that they would appear with the first note and disappear with the last’.21 This remark is in keeping with the composer’s notion of the ensemble being in flux, with instruments and tones coming and going – a state of affairs more in keeping with the idea of disappearance than fury. At the same time, the title refers to a Bohemian Dance Furiant that is characterized by the presence of alternating duple and triple metres, a feature that is clearly audible in the music. Furioso is in three parts, each with modified instrumentation: the opening section is largely devoted to strings, harp and piano; the middle portion expands the ensemble through the use of wind; and the final one is dominated by the wind, with the soprano saxophone an audible presence, as are wine glasses filled with glass balls. As with 128 erfüllte augenblicke, the succession of moments is important, and so is the extensive use of quiet markings. However, in furioso the music is played in a fixed order, therefore facilitating greater refinement in the transitions from one moment to the next. Furioso also contains a larger range of inflections within the moment, such as tone colour gradations around the same pitch or inflections from nearby pitches. At rehearsal figure 43, for example, the pitch-class E♭ saturates the texture for fourteen bars, and the final section of the piece frequently deploys chords that emphasize a particular pitch-class.

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The essay title ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’ (2007) gives an indication that Spahlinger’s style of prose is idiosyncratic.22 It is distinctive too because it avoids any capital letters, a characteristic that is even more marked in German, which uses a capital for the first letter of each noun. Spahlinger explains that the title is a portmanteau of two quotations: one from Hölderlin, ‘this is the time of kings no longer’, the other from Marx, ‘in every epoch, the dominant thoughts are the thoughts of the dominant classes’.23 From this perspective, the article offers precise views on the issue of the language-character of music, a topic that is a central concern for most of the composers covered in this book (including Henze, who sought greater continuity with the past). Spahlinger states: ‘new music is the first and (as far as we know) the only music that suspends or disables the syntactical and language-like systems of its own tradition’. Furthermore, in a description of his own approach, he comments: ‘new music asks the materialistic question: what is sounding independently of the cultural system of perception, tonality?’ Later, he declares: ‘along with tonality, the expressive archetypes are passé’, adding, ‘only by showing unmediated expressive intent as illusion does music become heightened expression’.24 These sentiments (which bear some resemblance to the way Adorno argued that Beethoven examined expressive devices in his late style) are impressive for their clarity, and they have facilitated innovative approaches to musical material. They do, however, underestimate the capacity for tonal conventions to be received in non-conventional ways. Moreover, it is not a given that the constructions of subjectivity that emerge from the bourgeois tradition, which include the depiction of loneliness in the third act of Tristan und Isolde, are completely illusory. Spahlinger and Huber share with Kagel an interest in scrutinizing illusion, but they do so in a more directed political manner. At times, it seems that they are attracted by the idea, so rigorously refuted by Derrida, that it is possible to push beyond representation. The more compelling point made by their attempts to make social mechanisms perceptible in sound, however, is not that it is possible to escape from constructions, but that when expressive devices become more transparent it becomes possible to understand the processes by which aesthetic functions operate.

Ferneyhough Unlike Huber and Spahlinger, Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) is not associated with Lachenmann’s sphere of influence and, in contrast to the latter, he works substantially with pitches and intervals, even though textures are also important in his music. He concurs with Lachenmann that most unfiltered

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musical statements fall into pre-established meanings, but his solution to this problem is different: to generate events from complex, unexpected intersections of objects so that new energies can arise. Furthermore, Ferneyhough is distinct from the other composers in this section because he is British. Yet none of his career has been spent in his homeland, and he better fits the category of the international avant-garde (which was in decline when he became prominent) than any classification based on national profile. He is included in this volume because he was resident in Germany from 1973 to 1986, due to a teaching post at the Freiburg Hochschule für Musik, and because he taught regularly at the Darmstadt summer courses from 1976 to 1996, despite having moved to the United States in 1987. It is an interesting coincidence that his first three years in Freiburg overlapped with the time Rihm was studying with Klaus Huber (who had previously taught Ferneyhough in Basel), the senior composer at the same institution. Ferneyhough emerged on the international scene in the mid 1970s, at about the same time as Rihm. Cassandra’s Dream Song for solo flute, one of his early successes, dates from 1970, thereby placing the career of its creator almost exactly within the time frame of this book. Indeed, in one sense Ferneyhough’s work is postserial and constitutes a departure from the innovations of the post-war generation, particularly in its attention to energies and forces. In another, though, it is a recharging of the spirit of the 1950s, which is not to say that it constitutes a reassertion of integral serialism, but that its rigorous organization of parameters such as pitch, duration, rhythm and metre has roots in the earlier approach. This rationalism is, however, offset by an interest in what happens when systems malfunction: in a recent interview, the composer has commented: ‘if things didn’t go wrong, if there weren’t bugs in the system we probably wouldn’t be conscious beings at all’.25 The strongest influence is Boulez’s early Artaud-inspired scores, even though Ferneyhough’s preference is to sieve and funnel complex material into smaller constituents, rather than continually to expand events in the manner of Boulez.26 Ferneyhough is of the right generation to have been influenced by the spirit of 1968, but he was too committed at that time to the idea of musical material to consider writing political music. That said, there is something of the political spirit of this era in his much later opera Shadowtime. Although Ferneyhough’s music is not without passion or urgency, it can be forbidding on first hearing. In addition, its written format presents further challenges, due to the sheer density of information and detail: generally written in short note values, which give them a very black appearance, the scores are characterized by the extensive beaming that is used to

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articulate particular gestures and to create direction. Out of this mass of features, often audible gestures arise such as the rhythmic unisons that initiate the Second String Quartet (1980). The composer’s own account of processes in this piece explains how the opening is meant to convey the idea of a ‘super instrument’, by adding instruments, one by one, to the opening violin to create a textural thickening of sound, to which micro-variations such as different articulations of the same rhythm are then introduced.27 It is telling that Ferneyhough’s oeuvre includes a number of solo pieces: the format enables considerable intricacy, it allows experimentation, it requires only one person to devote significant time to learning a convoluted score, and it facilitates repeated performances.28 Major solo works include Unity Capsule for flute (1976), Time and Motion Study I for bass clarinet (1971–7), which takes its title from a study of efficiency in British industry, and Kurze Schatten II for guitar (1988). There is general agreement that Ferneyhough’s style underwent change in the 1980s, and it is evident from the essays and interviews of this time, discussed below, that a primary catalyst for this shift was the composer’s encounters with neo-Romanticism. Because, however, the Ferneyhough literature tends to endorse the composer’s view of neo-Romanticism, the extent to which grappling with this trend affected his thinking has hitherto gone unrecognized. The same essays (‘Form – Figure – Style’, 1982, and ‘Il tempo della figura’, 1984) that contain his critiques of neo-Romanticism are also the ones that develop the innovative idea of ‘figure’ as a way of maintaining the primacy of internal structural relations. In an exposition that, perhaps unconsciously, builds on Schoenberg’s concept of ‘Gestalt’, Ferneyhough conceives of ‘figure’ as follows: A gesture whose component defining features – timbre, pitch contour, dynamic level etc. – display a tendency towards escaping from that specific context in order to become independently signifying radicals, free to recombine, to ‘solidify’, into further gestural forms may, for want of another nomenclature, be termed a figure.29

What this formulation enabled Ferneyhough to do, therefore, was to take the idea of figure to a multidimensional level, but still one conceived structurally not hermeneutically. The debate about neo-Romanticism also encouraged Ferneyhough to think about the whole idea of subjectivity in his music, and one way in which he chose to do so was by turning to critical theory, which was a booming trend at this time. In relation to Lemma-Icon-Epigram for piano (1981), Ferneyhough seizes upon Walter Benjamin’s idea of allegory,30 which he finds to be consistent with his own preference for an object to

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stand for something else as opposed to representing itself in the manner of neo-Romantic ‘symbols’. In addition, Kurze Schatten II for guitar (1988) derives its name from a Benjamin essay, by taking the discussion of the moment that shadows disappear as an idea for music in which objects are revealed.31 Later, Shadowtime (2004) was based on Benjamin’s death on the Spanish border; Ferneyhough has described it as an ‘opera of ideas’, because, he explains, ‘one can consider ideas as beings with a life of their own’.32 The other influence from this time was Gilles Deleuze: Ferneyhough mentions that this theorist’s understanding of the painter Francis Bacon ‘was instrumental in making concrete some fundamental intuitions concerning my own work’.33 Ferneyhough’s final years as a resident in Germany were dominated by what became the Carceri d’invenzione cycle, on which Deleuze exerted an influence. The component scores are: Superscriptio, for piccolo (1981); Carceri d’invenzione I, for chamber orchestra (1982); Intermedio alla ciaccona, for violin (1986); Carceri d’invenzione II, for flute and chamber orchestra (1985); Études transcendantales, for soprano, flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord (1985); Carceri d’invenzione III, for fifteen wind instruments and percussion (1986); and Mnemosyne, for bass flute and tape (1986). The cycle as a whole, which lasts nearly one and a half hours, was premiered at Donaueschingen in 1986. Carceri I, II and III, the three ensemble scores, occupy a central role in this scheme and are all characterized by complex polyphony. The title, which means ‘Dungeons of Invention’, or ‘Inventive Dungeons’, is taken from a series of etchings by Giambattista Piranesi, in which the dungeons are characterized by a profusion of arches and walkways; and it is this layering and depth to which Ferneyhough responded. Reacting directly to the idea of inventive dungeons, he writes: ‘Since I hold that all invention comes from restriction, it seems particularly appropriate to imprison musical states, thus empowering them to express themselves by means of the implosive energies thereby released.’ With regard to these scores, he quotes the argument that Deleuze made in relation to Francis Bacon that painting is not about reproducing or inventing forms but about capturing forces.34 The comparison is appropriate because the way that musical objects are subjected to and generate categories of energy and force is a preoccupation in the cycle. Following the painting metaphor, he even indicates that the associations of instrumental groupings and materials are ‘deliberately somewhat “wiped over” (in the Baconian sense)’ in the middle of Carceri I.35 The notions of layering and of impacting forces are particularly evident in the opening pages of Carceri III, of which Ferneyhough comments: ‘It’s quite clear that the function of the brass instruments in the first part of the piece is to trigger new types of material in the woodwind.’36 In the passage shown in Ex. 5.3, which illustrates the first entry of the brass

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Ex. 5.3 Brian Ferneyhough, Carceri d’invenzione III, bars 12–15

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instruments in the score, it can seen that the three brass onsets, each of which is marked by percussion 2 (tenor drum), trigger new gestures in the elaborate clarinet writing. Since the preceding remarks on the Carceri cycle have used the composer’s own comments extensively, it is worth making two observations: first, that these scores are not easily approached without some conceptual guidance; and second, that verbal descriptions played a major role in the construction of these scores, as Toop’s account of the Carceri sketches demonstrates.37 This is music that is immersed in the processes by which it came into being and in the ideas of the time from which it sprang. Like the verbal reflections of Rihm, Lachenmann and Nicolaus A. Huber, Ferneyhough’s writings have been published in collected form, and alongside these volumes they offer a valuable record, in idiosyncratic prose, of the debates that informed them. ‘Form – Figure – Style’ originates from the same year (1982) as Carceri I, and may well have been formulated in response to the experience of teaching with Rihm at Darmstadt in the same year. In it, Ferneyhough refers to the ‘deliberate re-mystification of musical expression’ and judges that ‘the expressive potential of music is being eroded by continual resort to false forms of directness’.38 Attempting to understand what neo-Romantic composers mean by the term ‘expression’, he adds, ‘the essence of the matter would seem to be this: that the musical sign or sign-constellation be, to a significant degree, transparent to emotive intentionality’. As well as doubting this capacity for direct signification, Ferneyhough detects a further problem with what he calls this ‘Pavlovian semantics’: in an argument that places a surprising premium on the idea of organicism, he maintains that material strongly denoting an emotional state does not interact well with structural processes in a score.39 The second section of this chapter demonstrates that there were some signally weak ideas associated with neo-Romanticism, and Ferneyhough may well have had these in mind. However, his general argument refuses to countenance the intertextual idea that music may signify by referring to musics that exist outside its own internal structural order. Consequently, his stance also misses the point that composition can be a form of reception that is capable of modifying the meanings of received materials, as is demonstrated by Rihm’s Fremde Szene II. This score was not in existence when Ferneyhough wrote the article, but it was when he consolidated his perspective in the essay ‘Il tempo della figura’ (1984) and in subsequent interviews. It appears, however, that Ferneyhough was agitated not only by the presence of Rihm, but also by that of Lachenmann at the 1982 Darmstadt course. In an interview from 1983, he talks of being disturbed by the ‘recent

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rapprochement between the new Romantics and the sociocritical school, the musica negativa of Lachenmann and others’. He continues: [T]hey both have similar views of what we might call ‘History’ with a capital ‘H’. Each of them refers – Rihm positively, Lachenmann negatively – to a posited totality of history. One draws his musical nourishment from it; the other generates semantic significance by constantly negating it in every moment of a work.40

Writing in 1990, Lachenmann constructs a similar dialectic in order to contend that neo-Romanticism and structural mannerism (his term for the followers of Ferneyhough) are two sides of the same coin.41 Despite Lachenmann’s corrosive comments about neo-Romanticism, Ferneyhough’s observations suggest that Lachenmann formed an affinity with Rihm at the 1982 Darmstadt course, and thereby left the English composer in a somewhat isolated position. Beyond interpersonal dynamics, Ferneyhough’s perception of the situation is that the two German composers closed ranks, because the Austro-German tradition was a more pressing concern to them than it was to him. Hence Ferneyhough’s critique of neo-Romanticism is connected to his unease at the emergence of a specifically Austro-German trait. Despite such misgivings, his critique of neo-Romanticism draws on a concept of illusion that closely resembles Lachenmann’s critique of the way performance practice conveys the past. In a sentence that could almost have come from Lachenmann’s critique of Henze, he writes: ‘Like the beautiful illusion of perfection offered by many virtuoso performers, the compositional style which aspires implicitly to the status of natural object denies us entry into the crossplay of forces by which that illusion is sustained.’42 It is, of course, a major aim for Lachenmann, Huber and Spahlinger to engage with precisely the forces by which illusions are maintained. Despite a comparable awareness of these processes, for Ferneyhough it is more important to block such associations. As mentioned earlier, the neo-Romanticism debate has spurred Ferneyhough to consider the question of subjectivity in relation to his own music, and one way by which he has done so is by conceiving of ‘the visionary ideal of a work entering into conversation with the listener as if it were another aware subject’.43 This is a valid proposal in so far as it indicates that musical understanding is an intersubjective process, but it is limited by appearing to envisage such interactions as being confined to a structural level. Another approach he takes to the issue of subjectivity, in a later essay from 1993, is to argue that the impact of personal history on the unfolding of material ‘means the acceptance of irrational, locally determined states’.44 Again, this is a reasonable proposition, but it too is

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restricted by being conceived primarily in structural terms that do not envisage music participating in a larger signifying network beyond the boundaries of its inner momentum. If Ferneyhough’s obsessions with construction seem narrow in an age of eclecticism, they do nevertheless enable unexpected configurations and situations, and these do not have to be experienced within the confines of the composer’s own understanding of musical material.

Historical reflection Neo-Romanticism In relation to the spirit of 1968, the instinctive approach of the neoRomantics was more obviously connected to Stockhausen’s intuitive music than it was to the political music of the time. However, the music and politics debates in Germany during the early 1970s challenged a range of institutional assumptions – and neo-Romanticism certainly benefited from the destabilization of entrenched modernist dogma. After these disputes reached their peak in 1972, they left something of a vacuum which the neo-Romantics, who did not wish to talk about politics, were able to fill as early as the mid 1970s. Chapter 2 demonstrates that this momentum was not restricted to young composers through the example of Killmayer’s turn to Schumann in 1972. Furthermore, another older figure, Aribert Reimann (b. 1936), felt an affinity with this shift and wanted to connect with a new generation, as demonstrated by his article ‘Salut für die junge Avantgarde’ from 1979 (compositionally, he responded rather later in his Sieben Fragmente für Orchester in memoriam Robert Schumann, 1988).45 Reimann’s article appears in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik immediately after a portmanteau article entitled ‘Junge Avantgarde’, which contains statements by many of the composers that Reimann discusses. This heading was chosen in order to avoid terms such as ‘new simplicity’, ‘neoprimitivism’ or ‘neo-tonal’. But it contains something of a paradox, which is also evident in the title of Reimann’s essay, because it relates to a group of composers who reject much that was associated with avant-gardism – even if their disdain for the immediate past might be described as avantgardist in spirit. In order of age, the composers considered by Reimann are Ulrich Stranz (b. 1946), Hans-Christian von Dadelsen (b. 1948), Manfred Trojahn (b. 1949), Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952), Hans-Jürgen von Bose (b. 1953), Wolfgang von Schweinitz (b. 1953) and Detlev MüllerSiemens (b. 1957).

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Reimann maintains that this diverse group is characterized more by individual profiles than by collective action. Nevertheless, he identifies some common traits, a central one being ‘the rediscovered link with tradition, taking it up again in a conscious re-experiencing, in order then to formulate something new from an altered viewpoint’.46 Significantly, this is a perspective that envisages composition being influenced by reception practice, in a way rather different from the straightforward conservatism that is often attributed to this group. Another feature that distinguishes these composers from the post-war generation is that they are are not defined by their innovation of techniques and procedures. As Dibelius commented: ‘For them, composing is primarily an attitude, a way of living out their subjective view of the world and at the same time a testimony, an emanation of their fundamental situation in music.’47 It is also striking that many of these composers, namely von Bose, von Dadelsen, Müller-Siemens, von Schweinitz and Trojahn, studied with Ligeti, perhaps finding in him a link to the past despite his stated hostility to neo-Romanticism. Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s variationen über ein thema von mozart (1977), for large orchestra, was composed during 1976 in California where the composer, somewhat incongruously, was based at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. This ten-minute score is based on an eight-bar section from Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music K 477; it opens with a short adagio theme and introduction that is followed by six variations and a three-part coda. If the choice of Mozart might not immediately align von Schweinitz with neo-Romantic sensibilities, the manner in which he takes the material away from its classical roots quickly dispels such concerns. This tendency is particularly marked in Variation 4 (a scherzo), Variation 5 (an adagio) and Variation 6 (a funeral march), where the composer does not hesitate to pull the music in the direction of the Mahlerian connotations carried by these markings. The coda returns to a statement of the theme, marked ‘ganz leise, wie aus ferner Erinnerung’ (‘completely quiet, as if from distant memory’), though the inclusion of the swanee whistle in the score at this point imbues the sentiment with a degree of postmodernist irony. Moreover, there are further quotations in the coda, which are annotated in the score. One of these serves to confirm the notion of a group of composers, because it is taken from von Bose’s First String Quartet. Another extends the intertextual scope: a solo trombone plays the descending passage sung by Jesus at the end of No. 57 (recitative) from Bach’s St John Passion, and von Schweinitz quotes his words, ‘Es ist vollbracht’ (‘It is accomplished’), above the trombone line. There is a sense of stylistic playfulness in the way this score mixes quotations, but the choice of music by Mozart and Bach instils in it a tone of

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moral seriousness which invites comparisons with Rihm’s slightly later chamber opera Jakob Lenz. 1978 was the year in which neo-Romanticism made its mark at Darmstadt, and the course included a performance of the 21-year-old Müller-Siemens’s Variationen über einen Ländler von Schubert for ten instruments. The piece takes its theme from the third of Schubert’s 17 Deutschen Tänzen, D366, stating the Ländler directly, before a set of variations which are somewhat reminiscent of Hindemith. The same year also featured string trios by von Bose, von Schweinitz and Rihm (his substantial Musik für drei Streicher), all three of which contain allusions to late Beethoven. The Streichtrio by von Bose is dedicated to Rihm; it is in two movements, of which the second is an adagio featuring, at bar 81, a quotation from bar 156 of Schoenberg’s String Trio, which is acknowledged in the score. This second movement works up to what von Bose described as a ‘“hot”, thus emotional, inner catastrophe’ in bar 118, which becomes transformed into what he called a ‘“cold”, devastating external catastrophe’ in bars 119 and 120 (see Ex. 5.4), which contain the following marking: ‘Brutal, as if without expression. Plenty of bow, plenty of bow pressure!’ The final section is marked ‘very quiet and gently flowing. Tranquillissimo’; and the score specifies there should be no accents for its duration. Ex. 5.4 Hans-Jürgen von Bose, String Trio, bars 119–125

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In the composer’s understanding, this concluding passage takes the ingredients of the catastrophe, that is, the minor thirds and semitones, mainly heard in chords, and turns them into something else; more idealistically, he adds, ‘this theme – in concrete terms the minor third-second step – completely newly illuminated begins quietly a kind of new life’.48 It is easy to follow his drift: a rising line, mainly in the viola, deploys microtone symbols to flatten the thirds and to sharpen the semitones. Despite these microtone inflections, this music is explicitly tonal: the viola articulates the shape of an E triad, with the surrounding harmony also being centred on E.49 For von Bose, this music is a ‘cautious manifestation of a beauty ideal’ that he associates with an ‘undisturbed, growing nature’,50 a connection that evokes conservatively the nineteenth-century constellation of tonality, organicism and nature but simultaneously relates it to a late-twentiethcentury ecological concern. Given the dedication to Rihm, it is quite possible that von Bose was influenced by his associate’s Third Quartet. The two scores certainly have features in common: both chop and change textures and styles; both feature plenty of tonal writing, used more for expressive effect than as a system for organizing the music; and both favour an adagio sensibility. In addition, the stillness of the closing section from von Bose’s score has some of the qualities of the concluding adagio passage from the second movement of Rihm’s Third Quartet, despite it preferring rising motion to the latter’s falling appoggiaturas. It was perhaps unfortunate for von Bose and von Schweinitz that their scores received premieres on the same occasion as a work of the stature of Rihm’s Musik für drei Streicher. Nevertheless, the comparison is instructive, because it reveals that what really separates this piece and others by Rihm from the music of his contemporaries is its aptitude for changing the meanings of gestures. The lecture in which von Bose discusses his String Trio also expands on his wider aesthetic: one that is equally dismissive of music committed to a doctrine of progress through material and technique, and of music with a political message. In presenting this perspective, he associates himself with figures such as Müller-Siemens, von Schweinitz, von Dadelsen and Rihm – contemporaries he calls a ‘kind of group’. For young composers, he argues, the belief in progress is shattered and they are connected by a yearning for a lost beauty and content.51 Speaking collectively, he indicates it is their wish to write comprehensible, succinct music, which would not be ‘new simplicity but simply good music’.52 Given such terminology, it may well be that Lachenmann had this essay in mind when he condemned what he calls ‘the apostles of nature and tonality’.53

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The yearning for lost beauty is not one that Rihm articulates in these terms; but when von Bose refers in the same essay to consciousness of the actual nature of music, he is closer to his peer, even if the latter would have chosen the word ‘state’ in preference to ‘nature’. In the same year that von Bose expressed this view, Rihm delivered his lecture ‘Der geschockte Komponist’, in which he contrasts the purifying approach of what he calls ‘exclusive techniques’ (serialism) with the more risky outlook of inclusive composition in a manner that is compatible with the general drift of his peer group. Nevertheless, he stops short of the more wholesale condemnation of modernity advocated by von Bose and von Schweinitz. Writing in 1979, von Schweinitz does not hesitate to draw parallels between what he considers to be an outmoded model of modernity and approaches to composition in the 1950s: We have seen the end of that belief in progress which for a whole century was the mainspring of cultural development. Rationalism has proved itself incapable of organizing the world rationally, and an over-developed materialism has led only to a self-perpetuating cycle of frustration. As we become increasingly aware of how the human spirit is alienated from a world governed by materialistic and rationalistic criteria, we sense a need for re-humanization.

Directly linking this account of rationality to music, he continues: ‘Amid the euphoria of the 1950s, rationalism gave birth to a new constructivism – to an all-embracing serial method which was purely abstract. After that came the aleatory consequence, which exposed certain absurdities in the new serialism.’54 This sense of frustration with the status quo in the new music scene is shared by von Dadelson, who writes of composers grovelling to the ideologues of new music.55 Compositionally, von Schweinitz was able to express his discomfort with prevailing values in his Messe (1983), which draws extensively on established contrapuntal techniques. Writing about it, he comments: ‘With our rationality firmly fixed on the “logic” of our present situation we are prepared to surrender the earth. Thus the search for a higher reason is at once utopian and essential for continued existence.’56 The need for communication after the age of the avant-garde is also important for Trojahn, who offers a more modest utopian dimension than von Schweinitz, arguing that the artwork ‘formulates the momentary state of utopia of an individual’.57 Trojahn also strikes a more measured tone with regard to earlier approaches to composition: he writes of how his wish to write expressive music was influenced by Ligeti’s cluster technique, for instance in his First Symphony (1974), by Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s use of quotations and allusions, and by the idea expressed in Ligeti’s essay ‘Form

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in the New Music’ that form should arise during the compositional act, not from predetermined ideas.58 Despite their inconsistencies, such views marked a definite historical point at which a younger generation expressed its frustrations with a vision of modernity based on rationalization and rejected the associated values of the post-war avant-gardes. They conveyed a sense of environmental foreboding as well, which, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, does not look misplaced. In addition, they expressed a desire to occupy a space that is not controlled by technological progress, an aspiration that likewise is more than a product of its time – even if its stronger utopian manifestations have not aged well. Beyond the untidiness of this moment, however, what is clear is that these composers were engaging dialectically with established Darmstadt values: in order for them to advocate the historical necessity of a particular approach, they needed to negate a particular approach to musical material. In order to embrace a more distant past, they deemed it necessary to reject the more immediate past that was represented by the modernism of the 1950s. The debates about neo-Romanticism at Darmstadt included contributions from Carl Dahlhaus. His first response derived from the all-important year of 1978; indeed, it appears principally to be directed at Bose’s pursuit of a beauty-ideal (Schönheitsideal). Dahlhaus’s point was that whether one talks of beauty, of sensibility or of subjectivity, there is contradiction between the epithet ‘new’ and its dependence on something already in existence.59 And although he acknowledged the value of a move away from the technical jargon of the 1950s and the political posturing of the 1960s, he berated values that are not rooted in theory on the grounds that they are not contestable.60 His second intervention came from the 1984 course, and was published in the same issue of the Darmstädter Beiträge as Ferneyhough’s critique of neo-Romanticism in ‘Form – Figure – Style’. That the debate was still unfolding at this point is evident from Dahlhaus’s remark: ‘Anyone who prefers not to talk about the subject, be it for reasons of shyness, suspicion or despair, must remain silent about what is happening in music at the present time.’ Although he did not name any of the figures associated with this turn to subjectivity, he did explicitly refer to the ‘New Simplicity’ and the ‘New Tonality’, portraying these movements ‘as attempts to reinstate subjectivity as the decisive factor of a “context of meaning” in sound’, as a reaction against the ‘material fetishism’ of the 1950s.61 As a corrective to this position – and to that of formalist orthodoxy – he argued that there was a latent subjectivity in the music of the 1950s.62 Nevertheless, he detected continuity between the stress on subjectivity and the post-serial developments

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of the 1960s, because the latter innovations brought to the fore parameters such as intensity and tone colour that were not at the centre of structural thinking. For him, this linkage manifested itself in an affinity between what he called the ‘secondary sound qualities’ and ‘the expressive element of music’.63 Although his basic point was cogent, it demonstrated little awareness of Lachenmann’s efforts to create structure through texture. Evoking American minimalism, the term ‘neue Einfachheit’ (new simplicity) suggested that the emergent aesthetic of the 1970s marked a return to tonal security, and was therefore insensitive to the double-coding that is so characteristic of Rihm’s music. Not surprisingly, the denomination was rejected by all the composers to whom it was applied. (The expression used in this book, ‘neo-Romanticism’, is not entirely satisfactory either, because it evokes a straightforward return to the past, but some terminology is required in order to acknowledge a tendency at the time.) It would seem, however, that Dahlhaus’s use of the term ‘new simplicity’ did not bother Rihm unduly on this occasion, since photographs from the 1984 Darmstadt course show him very much at ease with Dahlhaus.64 It was in the 1980s that the word ‘postmodernism’ achieved currency in Germany and became more widely used than ‘new simplicity’, but Dahlhaus did not make the connection in 1984. The postmodernism debate in Germany during the 1980s was steered by the public interventions of Jürgen Habermas, who was able spontaneously to apply principles derived from his monumental Theory of Communicative Action to matters of the moment. His first major intervention in this debate was the essay ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, which, as a speech, was delivered in 1980 on receiving the Adorno Prize from the city of Frankfurt. Habermas sees the modernist project as faltering around 1967, but argues that the dynamic of modernism and modernity has not exhausted itself.65 The reason he gives for the ageing of modernism is related to his general critique of a form of modernity in which specialized systems have failed to connect with everyday life. Likewise, he contends, the excessive attention paid to artistic technical problems prevents aesthetic experience being related to life problems. Habermas views postmodernism as a conservative attempt to bypass this difficulty, instead of trying to address it and thereby to continue the project of modernity and modernism. And it was this linkage of postmodernism and conservatism, which Habermas was to extend in further writings, that dominated the German debate about postmodernism. The comments of von Schweinitz and von Bose fit all too well with what Habermas considers to be the problem-avoidance adopted by what he called ‘young conservatives’: ‘They remove into the sphere of the far away and the

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archaic the spontaneous powers of imagination, self-experience and emotion.’66 What is more, the linking Habermas notes of ‘the far away’ and the ‘spontaneous powers of imagination’ is helpful for revealing a latent connection between Stockhausen’s intuitive music and neo-Romanticism. For Habermas, unless self-experience and emotion engage with the conditions of late-twentieth-century modernity, they are likely to serve as modes of obscurity instead of providing channels for aesthetic expression. The musicologist Hermann Danuser has defined the neo-Romantic tendency as postmodernist, in one of the earliest applications of this term to music in Germany. Importantly, however, in doing so he judges the emerging composers in a more positive light than Habermas’s influential model suggests.67 As early as 1984, he describes Rihm in terms of a tension between modernism and postmodernism;68 and his perspective on ‘postmodernism’ has changed as the debate has advanced, partly in response to the more positive reading of the tendency advanced by the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch. In a later article, Danuser perceptively holds postmodernism to be more an internal critique of modernism than a way to surpass it.69 Helga de la Motte-Haber, another musicologist, notes that Habermas’s account of neo-conservative postmodernism provided a ready-made, and hastily applied, category for neo-Romanticism; but she tends to corroborate its negative connotations. Her principal complaint is that this music detaches the expressive devices of tonality from the hierarchical system that generates them, thereby creating a divergence between surface and structure.70 As an example of this tendency, she turns to the opening movement of Rihm’s Third Quartet, arguing that it offers an unworkable combination of structural thinking indebted to serialism and expressive gestures derived from nineteenth-century tonality. Furthermore, she distinguishes it from Kagel’s piano étude An Tasten (1977), which draws exclusively on tonal material, because the latter ‘represents an element of historical distance which seems neutralised in neo-Romantic works’ and because it reveals the illusory qualities of the expressive devices it deploys.71 In making this judgement, de la Motte-Haber is right to locate a discrepancy between structure and expression in Rihm’s movement, but is over hasty in taking such a negative view of it. For her standpoint condemns one of the defining creative features of Rihm’s music from the 1970s: its attention to the ways that expressive features can be separated from the system that generated them and can function as signifiers in a different context. It is precisely from this disparity that the music derives its excitement. The emergence of neo-Romanticism in Germany had a particular dynamic, but it was not a unique event. Moving across the Atlantic,

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George Rochberg (1918–2005) presented a more obvious parallel (although he was already an established composer associated with a constructivist aesthetic before he changed tack) than the minimalism with which this tendency was initially associated. His well-known Third String Quartet (1972) refers to Beethoven, Bartók and Mahler, not for ironic effect, but for expressive purposes, thereby inviting comparison with, say, Rihm’s Musik für drei Streicher or even his own Third String Quartet. Nevertheless, the two Third Quartets sound far from similar because Rochberg’s pluralist practice juxtaposes in unexpected ways substantial passages that are stylistically consistent internally, whereas Rihm’s more volatile inclusive approach changes stylistic associations from phrase to phrase.72 Within Germany, the impact of historical reflection was felt beyond the group discussed above; indeed, it is a central argument in this book that most composers responded to this tendency in one way or another. Adriana Hölszky (b. 1953) is not normally associated with the group of composers that came to prominence in the 1970s, one obvious reason for this being that she grew up in Romania and did not move to Germany until 1976, another being that she did not obviously emulate them. However, the title of her String Trio Innere Welten (1981) suggests an affinity with Rihm’s Im Innersten. In four movements, this score is characterized generally by filigree, light textures, by frequent use of tremolandi, and by dispersed, non-aligned, arpeggio-like patterns. The fast and fragmented fourth movement includes three insertions marked ‘Choral’ which bear resemblances, especially the second of these, to the adagio passages in Rihm’s Third Quartet, because in their reflective character they seem to offer shelter from more turbulent textures. Nevertheless, Hölszky’s notion of inner worlds does not extend to the more corporeal conception of inwardness that Rihm attributes to Im Innersten. York Höller (b. 1944), who studied with Bernd Alois Zimmermann, is slightly older than the composers that are associated with neoRomanticism, but he may well have been influenced by them. His Mythos (1979) for thirteen instruments, percussion and tape is something of a turning point in this regard, with its deployment of Wagnerian music in the tape part. Moreover, this turn to the past was not a passing phase. As Whittall observes: The seventh and last of York Höller’s short Tagträume (Daydreams) for violin cello and piano, of 1994, is not only marked to be played ‘in the tempo of Schubert’s “Der Leiermann”’: it alludes unambigiously to several aspects of that composition’s materials – its pedal-based harmony, its circling repetitions, its rhythmic and intervallic motives, its unsparingly bleak atmosphere.73

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As might be expected from a student of Zimmermann, plenty of Höller’s music combines instruments and tape. However, the composer resists the inherently pluralist properties of the medium by means of a traditional notion of art as an organism, in which ‘all elements are linked by functional relations’.74 This tension between fragmentation and restoration is one that is endemic to historically informed music, and one that is often at the root of divided opinions about such music.

Zimmermann The appellation ‘new simplicity’ has also been applied to the work of Walter Zimmermann (b. 1949), but in a less damning sense than was used in connection with the neo-Romantics. In January 1977, a series of concerts took place in Cologne under the title ‘Neue Einfachheit’, which included works by the American composers Cage, Feldman and Reich, scores by Kagel and Walter Zimmermann, and traditional Korean music. Wolfgang Becker’s programme note for the third concert contains the following remarks: New Simplicity characterizes cross-connections between historical and geographical boundaries, commonalities of musical language beyond notions of style and categories of musical genre . . . New Simplicity is an experience of contemporary music observable in many countries: the elemental simplification of the soundscape and the transferral of complex structure into the internal musical form and performance practice.75

Clearly, the term ‘new simplicity’ is being used in this context to articulate a set of values very different from those associated with a return to Romantic music. It is no great surprise to see Zimmermann included in the company of American composers, since he has assiduously cultivated connections with them not only as a composer, but also as a scholar and promoter of American music. In 1976 he published a collection of his own interviews under the title Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Composers; and in 1977 he founded a venue in Cologne called the Beginner Studio, which played a leading role in bringing American music to Germany by offering weekly concerts. He was also instrumental in arranging Feldman’s presence at Darmstadt during the 1980s, regarding his attendance as a remedy for a situation in which ‘since Adorno, composers trusted their ideas more than their ears’.76 The piano piece Beginner’s Mind (1977) is representative of Zimmermann’s desire to be free of the weight of the European tradition, a goal that was

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elaborated when he composed a four-part collection entitled Lokale Musik (1977–81) that explores vernacular dance forms from the composer’s native Franconia. The melodies he uses, which include waltzes, mazurkas and galops, are from albums that were gathered during the nineteenth century, and it was these volumes that Zimmermann sought during field trips to the region. He draws on these notated versions of vernacular sources with a view to trying to release the materials from the titles that were consigned to them by the original collectors. He comments: ‘This assigning of names and designations must be offset by a process of neutralization, even to the point of anonymity. This will restore the dances to the nameless, flexible, spontaneous, accidental and improvisatory world from which they came.’77 Zimmermann’s perspective has the merit of acknowledging that the process of collecting tunes is not a neutral one. Nevertheless, his attempt to correct a historical process carries an idealistic dimension that is, in its own way, as unrealistic as von Bose’s endeavours to evoke nature through Romantic expressions. Together, all the pieces of Lokale Musik last about two hours, but the components can readily be performed either individually or in shorter combinations. The first part, Ländler Topographien, is written for orchestra, while the other three sections feature an assorted array of scores for soloists and chamber ensembles. The second group Leichte Tänze, for example, contains a piece for each of the following: string quartet, two clarinets, a six-instrument ensemble and guitar. Ländler Topographien takes it title from Zimmermann’s view that the topography of a landscape influences the music that stems from the region. After the title page, the score bears an inscription, which creates a very German sense of place, from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Her Recovery’. Nature, she who’s your friend drowses and ails, and you Dally, giver of life? Cannot you heal her, then, Potent breezes of Aether, Sunlight’s well-springs, will you not help?78

The implication would seem to be that Zimmermann is searching for a pastoral healing process in turning to material rooted in a locality. Nevertheless, he uses a number of procedures to distance the music from such ‘gemütlich’ associations: one such mechanism divides an eight-bar Ländler into melodic, harmonic and rhythmic components; and another assigns melodic cells from the tune to instruments of the orchestra. The aim of these quasi-serial devices is a recognizably Cagean one: to neutralize the composer’s personality. Moreover, the scoring shows little influence of Romantic models: themes are dispersed around the orchestra in thin, transparent textures; accompanying patterns (which are often pizzicato) maintain the momentum of the quirky dance rhythms; and the instrumentation

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includes parts for alto, tenor and bass saxophones. The result is one in which the American influence is easy to hear: there is a touch of Aaron Copland but the most direct influence is minimalism, or even the post-minimalism of John Adams. It is arguable, therefore, that Zimmermann’s turn to dance forms exchanges the burden of one history for that of another. Nevertheless, by bringing American and German notions of locality into contact with each other, he creates a situation in which neither tradition knows quite where to put its feet. Ländler Topographien has received unexpected support from Lachenmann – a representative of just the sort of conceptual approach to composition from which Zimmermann was trying to escape – who senses in it an affinity with his own Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, which was also premiered in 1980. He comments: ‘it seems remarkable to me that two composers who at that time were working in completely different ways, would each in their “search for a lost sense of security” (albeit with different aims) have sought to gain insight into different niches of the same landscape-orientated collective sensibility’.79 Lachenmann does not directly include Zimmermann in the critical search for lost magic that he associates with himself, Nicolaus A. Huber and Spahlinger. But he considers Zimmermann to symbolize an alternative search for the same thing (a sense of rooted tradition): ‘aiming to rediscover magic, his programmatic topoi of niche and local music seemed to me to promise a counter-model to the affect music that was complacently regressing into a symphonic vocabulary’.80 A desire to combat ‘affect music’ was clearly uppermost in Lachenmann’s mind when he made this remark; nonetheless, he evidently sensed some resemblance between Zimmermann’s attempt to free dance tunes of historical accretions and his own efforts to salvage notions of security and homeliness from Baroque dance forms.

Goldmann Composers in West Germany during the 1970s responded to an aesthetic legacy that was fixated with material and structure. Their counterparts in East Germany, by contrast, reacted to a cultural policy that was dominated by the values of realism and functionality. Nevertheless, a precedent had been set for combining concepts of artistic and social progress by figures such as Hans Eisler (1899–1962) and Paul Dessau (1894–1979), who had sought to reconcile the influences of Schoenberg and Brecht.81 This attempt to blend what were often judged to be divergent values influenced the generation of East German composers that is represented by figures such as Georg Katzer (b. 1935), Friedrich Goldmann (b. 1941) and Friedrich

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Schenker (b. 1942), who did not allow their disdain for a Stalinist model of functionalism to prevent them from understanding musical material as a distillation of the world around them, and as a bridge to reality. As Dibelius noted, composers in East Germany built up a common experience and operated in a zone defined by an official programme and by private feelings, their music translating between state cultural politics and the inner momentum of the material.82 Friedrich Goldmann offers an interesting confluence of issues from the two Germanies: he attended Stockhausen’s composition seminar at the Darmstadt summer school (1959) and he became personally acquainted with Nono in the early 1960s. Nevertheless, despite his conviction that the break with the classical European tradition was necessary in order to move forward and despite writing for the sort of ensemble combinations that are associated with new music, Goldmann has also written four symphonies and a number of concertos. In an interview from 1988, Goldmann is very much preoccupied with the postmodernism debate, and suggests that postmodernism is characterized by a number of conflicting impulses.83 One of these is that the plurality of regions, times and functions accessible to people is countered by a widespread neutralization of reception. Another is that an event such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident can be blocked out by composers who retreat from reality into a safe world of pleasing sounds. Furthermore, he acknowledges that once-productive techniques such as serialism have become bogged down in academicism, but considers that the revival of the middle-European tradition (by which he means neoRomanticism) amounts to a plundering of the past. Equally, he views the pervasion of entertainment music as a central problem of our time. Instead of obscuring reality, Goldmann wants to reveal it for what it is, and hopes to lead from it to a more beautiful, more unified and better world. In this interview, therefore, he emerges as an advocate of critical modernism and puts forward what amounts to an Adornian view that, because musical material is socially sedimented, it constitutes an agent for social change. Ensemblekonzert 2 (1985) was written at a time when the fragility of the socio-political system in East Germany must have been evident, and at a time when, as Frank Schneider has indicated, music was trying to balance subtly internalized social-realist expectations with more widespread postmodernist practices.84 The piece is scored for sixteen players – a string and wind quintet with the addition of trumpet, trombone, harp, piano and two percussionists, like its predecessor Ensemblekonzert 1 – and reveals a clear A-B-C-B-A arch structure. Klangfarbenmelodie is the guiding principle at the opening of the score, which starts with a succession of segments, each of which gradually enforces a prominent pitch and then clouds it over before

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moving on to the next process. In a given place, most of the ensemble will be playing the same two or three pitches but at different paces and in varied figurations. The slightly improvisatory nature of this texture becomes more marked in the B section, where the instrumentalists pick up virtuosic flourishes from one another over sustained harmonies. It is in these cadenza-like segments, in which the instruments break into loosely coordinated fragments, that extended techniques come to the fore in this score. The most striking feature of the ‘scherzo’ is that on three occasions its broken-chord patterns switch to a minimalist-type sonority, the triadic music looming out of the texture and then receding. Schneider suggests that this ostinato-based idea is derived from the coda of the first movement of the original version of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony (bar 528), which the composer conducted during the period in which he was working on Ensemblekonzert 2.85 (Bruckner was a staple of the repertoire in both Germanies at this time.) The three passages use Bruckner’s chord sequence (D major–B♭ major–D♭ major), with the brass punching out triads like the horns in the symphony; and they retain the memory of the original’s arpeggiation but replace its solid 4/4 with 11/8 or 3/4, or with a combination of the two (see Ex. 5.5). In Bruckner’s symphony, the model constitutes part of a build-up to a massive C minor climax. In Goldmann’s score, it is placed at the peak of an arch form, but instead of functioning in a structural sense it has become a Ex. 5.5 Friedrich Goldmann, Ensemblekonzert 2, bars 159–63 (piano and strings)

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device that briefly illuminates the music and then vanishes. In what may be an ironic comment on neo-Romanticism, it thereby simultaneously alludes to and evades actual historical music. Certainly, this music is heard as direct, sensuous and tonal within a closely argued, non-tonal context. Hence, as well as alluding to neo-Romanticism, it enacts a tension between function and innovation of the sort that East German composers inherited from Eisler and Dessau. The way in which Goldmann makes the Bruckner passage lift off onto a different plane displays a certain amount of technical virtuosity, but it also illuminates his observation that contradictory events and ideas are found in close proximity within a postmodernist environment. The arch form of Ensemblekonzert 2 brings back earlier material, but it also establishes clear distinctions between different types of material and organization. Because these do not develop from one another and because no single idea achieves supremacy, a dichotomy arises between the way in which individual elements are integrated and the relative autonomy of the complexes to which they belong. In an understated way, this duality is a way of mixing incompatible doctrines of functional coherence and modernist contingency.

Heightened perception: the younger generation The composers discussed so far in this book have been defined either in terms of responses to post-war serialism or in terms of trying to negate its influence. This legacy has proved important for some composers born in the 1960s and beyond, but others have not felt the need to define themselves in relation to it.

Mahnkopf The innovations of the post-war years have certainly proved important for Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (b. 1962), who occupies a unique position in this book because he has pursued a career as a writer on the aesthetics of new music and as a composer. Many of the other figures discussed have produced substantial quantities of essays and programme notes relating to their own music and compositional strategies; but Mahnkopf’s publications extend to broader debates, particularly those concerning Adorno’s writings on new music. He has written and edited a number of books and is a founding editor of the journal Musik & Ästhetik. This dual focus is reflected in the fact that he studied composition with Ferneyhough from 1984 to 1987 and philosophy with Habermas in 1989, gaining a doctorate in philosophy

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in 1993. Indeed, a recent collection of his essays, which range from explanations of his own compositional techniques to topics such as the 9/11 terrorist attack and music and politics, shows him emulating Habermas the public intellectual.86 It is to be expected that someone with this background would be influenced by the philosophy of the Frankfurt school, but it is also notable that he differs from Ferneyhough in adopting a specifically German orientation in considering new music to be a continuation of the tradition of Beethoven and Wagner.87 In a perspective indebted to Harry Lehman, Mahnkopf argues in favour of what he called the ‘Zweite Moderne’.88 (The term is probably best translated as ‘second modernism’, while bearing in mind that the word ‘Moderne’ also evokes the larger field of modernity.)89 Not surprisingly, this category relies on classification of its precursors and competitors. One of these is ‘classical modernism’, which Mahnkopf, like many others, uses to describe modernist pioneers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Another is ‘first modernism’, which he applies to post-war composers such as Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Nono, while also placing Lachenmann and Ferneyhough in this group. And another still is ‘postmodernism’, which he identifies with Rihm’s aesthetic of inclusion and with a broader tendency to link aesthetic content and emotion directly. Mahnkopf considers that ‘Second modernism’ is a category that came into being in the 1980s, and it is one that he applies to his own music. He regards the term ‘new complexity’ as an attempt to acknowledge this shift, and interprets Ferneyhough’s turn to a multi-perspective style in the early 1980s as indicative of this transition. Accordingly, second modernism is characterized by ‘microtonality, complex rhythms, interlocking form complexes, polyworks, live-electronics, the use of computer-aided programmes, the whole spectrum of sound and noise, and by hybrid playing techniques’.90 Although Mahnkopf considers second modernism to be not so much a denial of postmodernism as an attempt to deal with the problems it has created, his depiction of second modernism depends on a reassertion of the idea of advanced material that postmodernism has challenged. One of the things that interest Mahnkopf as a representative of second modernism is the application of deconstruction to music. It might be argued that this idea is important to Lachenmann as well, in the sense that he tries to reveal a side of musical objects that is hidden by a dominant discourse. The distinction, however, is that Lachenmann gives no indication that he is actively trying to apply deconstruction to composition, whereas Mahnkopf has consciously interacted with Derrida’s ideas as a theorist and as a composer (he wrote a piece entitled différance for violin in 1988). Furthermore, for Mahnkopf deconstruction is less about suppressed

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meaning than about the idea of difference as non-alignment and nonsynchronicity: he maintains that ‘structure, form, material, concept, performance, semantic’ become different from one another, that they are placed in a shifting array of alliances and contradictions that extends beyond a single work. This mobility allows him to depart from approaches that he associates with first modernism, namely the serialist ideal of all constituents being aligned and the leftist negation of Spahlinger.91 He envisages instead ‘deconstruction in place of dialectic, radical difference in place of antagonism, non-linearity in place of linearity, paradox in place of synthesis’.92 Although Mahnkopf’s aspiration to take composition beyond the negation of illusion is commendable, his appropriation of deconstruction is somewhat skewed, because unlike deconstruction it is more concerned with production than reception. His compositional deconstruction does not, for example, consider the possibility that it might be feasible to hear in Spahlinger’s music qualities of non-alignment that are not determined by the composer’s own doctrines.93 Equally, it does not envisage that Mahnkopf’s own music might be heard in ways other than those determined by its compositional processes. Mahnkopf’s music shares with Ferneyhough’s a rather forbidding appearance on the page and likewise offers large amounts of aural information. In keeping with the idea of difference and non-synchronicity, it is conceived in multiple, polyphonic layers to which the composer suggests we listen ‘diagonally’, so that we catch some events but are not overwhelmed by trying to process them all. These characteristics are to be found in the energetic Kammerkonzert for piano and chamber ensemble (1996), in which the filigree writing of the solo piano part forms complex proportions and multilayered gestures. Kammerkonzert is also an example of a polywork from which four related scores were derived: Kammerminiatur is the solo cadenza from the piano part and Kammerstück is the rest of the piano part. From the remainder of the ensemble, the composer has generated a trio for low wind instruments and a trio for low strings; these pieces retain the pitch and rhythmic material of the ensemble lines but modify parameters such as articulation, dynamics, tempo and tone colour. The resulting scores can be played in succession to form a cycle of five pieces, including the combined version of Kammerkonzert, in which the composer hopes that the ‘relationship of part and whole, of unity and difference, of identity and non-identity can be heard’.94 Incidentally, this notion of polyworks runs in parallel with Rihm’s approach to multi-forms in the 1990s, particularly the group of works dating from the same time as Kammerkonzert that were absorbed into

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Jagden und Formen. The two ideas are of course different, but the analogy makes it harder to draw firm distinctions between categories of postmodernism and modernism. However, even if the idea of a second modernism and its associated characteristics is less clear-cut than its advocates indicate, Mahnkopf’s blend of compositional and critical perspectives still makes him a stimulating figure in contemporary German music.

Mundry Isabel Mundry (b. 1963) taught composition at the Frankurt Musikhochschule before taking up her current post at the Zurich Musikhochschule. The influences she cites on her music are distinctly non-German: the polyphony of Dufay, Cage’s open concept of time and Debussy’s notion of temporal process, particularly as found in Jeux – a score that was widely studied by the post-war avant-garde.95 In 1994, Mundry spent a year studying at IRCAM, and she used the computer programming skills she acquired there to model the arithmetic processes she employs in the string quartet no one (1995), which was then realized as a handwritten score, without electronics. The title no one could have several meanings: no one line, or no one instrument, or no one formation, all of which relate to the composer’s notion of no one uniform metrical system prevailing.96 The quartet is very much polyphonic music: except for obvious markers in the score, there is a sense of four independent, if somewhat ephemeral, lines in which lyrical gestures mingle with the more agitated gestures. The result does not sound like Ferneyhough or Mahnkopf, because the individual components do not combine to form larger gestures. Nevertheless, the level of non-synchronicity in this score and the computerassisted planning place it very much in the category of what Mahnkopf calls ‘second modernism’. Spiegel Bilder for clarinet and accordion (Mirror Images, 1996) uses two reed instruments powered by different mechanisms – human and mechanical, the accordion having become something of a favourite on the contemporary music scene. In keeping with her concept of non-simultaneity, the composer suggests in the score that there can be discrepancies of up to five seconds between the two instrumentalists, and she uses bar lines primarily to indicate sections and different ideas. In fact she creates a spatial equivalent to this temporal non-alignment by asking the clarinettist to sit further back on the stage than the accordionist. Initially the clarinet carries melodic material and the accordion offers chords, but fusions of these functions become important later in the piece. One section of the score features sustained sonorities in both instruments, with the composer asking the clarinettist to imitate the swell of the accordion bellows so that the two

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instruments do indeed reflect each other. And this crescendo–diminuendo idea remains important in the final section of the piece, initiated by a fifteensecond pause, where the two instruments sound more like reflections of one expanded voice. It is this sense of acoustic enlargement that is conveyed by the title ‘mirror images’. Mundry does not expound a strong aesthetic position in the manner of many of her predecessors, although she writes music with its own identity. Nevertheless, by asking listeners to perceive heterogeneous processes, she does ask for a type of perception that is not predetermined.

Saunders Composers teach as well as compose, and so it is appropriate to include in this section Rebecca Saunders (b. 1967), who has studied with Rihm. Born in Britain, Saunders also received tuition from Nigel Osborne before becoming a resident of Berlin. Since Germany remains a major centre for new music, it is not hard to understand why Saunders chooses to live there. But she explains her decision in wider terms: as a composer, she says, ‘one feels one is making a valuable contribution to the fabric of contemporary society, just by getting on with one’s work’.97 Nevertheless, Saunders’s preference for Berlin has not prevented her from achieving recognition in her home country: she conceived the modular installation piece Chroma (which is an ongoing project) for the turbine hall of London’s Tate Modern in 2003 and was Composer in Residence at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2010. Although Saunders’s music does not sound like Rihm’s, it clearly has affinities with the sort of gestural directness that is characteristic of his music. The following comment reveals a shared understanding with Rihm’s approach to sound: ‘For me, what’s really important is enabling the listener to feel the magical physicality of sound, the timbre, the colour, the mass, the weight of sound. That’s what I feel I’m working with, almost like a sculptor works with different materials.’98 It is not hard to detect in this remark a sense of music that is compatible with Rihm’s perspective on the physicality of material. In addition, Saunders’s music reflects a way of thinking that is characteristic of Lachenmann and Kagel, whereby instrumental writing often includes the extraneous sounds that performers are normally encouraged to minimize, and that focuses attention on the actions that produce sounds. The twelve-piece ensemble of CRIMSON, for example, is supplemented by whistles, wind-up metronomes and three music boxes. Because the mechanisms for sound generation are so obvious in these objects, they help to draw attention to this dimension in the more familiar instruments.

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Music boxes have become something of trademark for Saunders: one is included in Molly’s Song 3, eleven in Cinnabar and, at the last count, 115 in a module of Chroma. The titles of Saunders’s scores indicate that they participate in a wider web of meanings: CRIMSON – Molly’s Song 1 (1995) and Molly’s Song 3 – shades of crimson (1996), for example, refer to Molly Bloom’s unpunctuated monologue from the conclusion of James Joyce’s Ulysses. As seen in the section on Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Chapter 2, this novel (and this section of it in particular) received plenty of attention from older modernist composers, who were interested primarily in the potential of Joyce’s streamof-consciousness technique. By contrast, when Saunders says of Molly’s Song 3 that it ‘seeks to sustain a musical energy strong enough to withstand the assaults of a succession of destructive events’, she approaches this polymorphic passage as a celebrated example of écriture féminine.99 At the end of CRIMSON the performers exclaim ‘yes’ in unison, using the word that is a continual, sensual presence in Bloom’s monologue. The titles of the crimson scores are semantically linked to that of Cinnabar, a double concerto for violin, C trumpet, ensemble and eleven music boxes (1999), which means ‘a bright red mineral form of mercuric sulphide’, or vermillion. The dictionary definition constitutes part of the composer’s programme note to the piece, which, typically for her, is presented as a series of discontinuous definitions and quotations, intended to indicate some of the preoccupations that informed the compositional process. It includes three short quotations from Gertrude Stein, one of which reads: ‘a person who demands attention purely by her being there . . . ’100 The thing that demands attention simply by being there in this score is the persistent presence of an E in the fourth stave space, especially in the solo parts, with the violinist articulating it on rapidly changing strings and deploying frequent microtonal inflections. Beneath this agitated exploration of sameness and difference, the ensemble contributes angular, accented shapes; and it provides textural variety by means of a throbbing, fading electronic organ. The music boxes are turned on in a section of spare writing towards the end of the piece, and they continue until the last bar where they run down over the course of a minute. They convey a sense of Victoriana, of something from the attic, referring to the past not as a presence or as a reservoir of injunctions, but as a more ephemeral residue. They also feel as if they are a trace of a substratum running though the piece, thus making a fragile connection between the immediate and broader past.

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Pintscher Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971) is very much a German composer but has been based in New York since 2010 and is active as a conductor. His ability was recognized at an early stage by Hans Werner Henze, who invited the young composer to his summer school in Montepulciano, Italy, in 1991 and 1992; from 1992 to 1994, Pintscher studied with Manfred Trojahn in Düsseldorf. This lineage places Pintscher more in line with the inclusive tendency in German music than with the refusal-of-habit strand or with the post-serial trend. Nevertheless, his scores demonstrate a considerable interest in tone, sonority and articulation, thereby creating nuances of sound that extend beyond any particular allegiance.101 The Bärenreiter website contains the following words, from 1995, by Lachenmann: ‘Matthias Pintscher, a composer full of creative energy – with an unerring instinct for formal and expressive effects – with a virtuoso sense of sound – most of all, capable of surprises. One who knows, and yet wants to know.’ It is perhaps surprising that Lachenmann would have paid this compliment to a composer who has enjoyed the support of Henze, and who has not sought avant-gardist credentials. It would seem, however, that Lachenmann’s remark is an acknowledgement of Pintscher’s interest in energy and sonority. Janusgesicht (2001), for viola and cello, is named after the two-faced Roman god Janus; and this derivation is reflected in the instruction that the two performers sit back to back. However, Pintscher has chosen not to write a two-faced score in the sense that the two instruments try to deceive each other; instead, he has worked with the idea of two voices creating a single shape. Indeed his notes in the score dwell on this idea by means of a number of aphoristic statements. Here is one of them: ‘One body, one shape – but two faces, two voices, two directions.’ Here is another: ‘Janusgesicht is concerned not with correspondence or communication between the two voices but with one voice dissolving into the other.’102 These intersections are played out in a work which specifies articulation down to bow changes, and in which the two instruments do indeed entwine around each other with trills, brief gestures, filigree textures and liminal sonorities, so that it is hard to unravel the two lines, as demonstrated in Ex. 5.6. (The instructions state: ‘The fourth string of the viola is tuned a semitone lower to B, notes that are to be played on the fourth string are notated as sounding.’) It does not, therefore, require ingenuity to understand these gestures in terms of an intersubjectivity that yearns to move beyond the confines of self. It is clear too that the subtle, enervated sounds in Janusgesicht are directly related to the actions that produced them. What differentiates them from

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Ex. 5.6 Matthias Pintscher, Janusgesicht for viola and violoncello 2001, BA 8271, passage from pages 1–2.

Lachenmann’s approach, though, is that they neither attempt to block out established playing techniques nor seek to challenge an ideology of beauty. Indeed Pintscher’s sounds strive for a delicate beauty, one that is more indebted to Debussy and Ravel than to German influences. The texts Pintscher sets look beyond Germany as well, one of his favoured authors being the American poet E. E. Cummings. On the one hand, Cummings’s broken lines resonate with the German approach to the fragment; on the other hand, they possess a lightness of touch and an individuality that is recognizably American and that links to Pintscher’s sense of the ephemeral. Nevertheless, the idiosyncrasies of Cummings’s typography do not transfer easily into song; in fact, Pintscher’s settings tend to reverse the normal outcome of fusing text and music by making the poems more comprehensible. For instance, the ‘Erstes Schneebild’ from his Lieder und Schneebilder for soprano and piano (2001) sets the words that Cummings places in brackets (but breaks up to an extent that they are not easily read) as spoken gaps in the melodic line, an effect which preserves the bracketed aspect but makes the meaning of the words clearer. The accompaniment conveys the poem’s minimal depiction of falling snow, partly through sparse textures and partly by exploring the piano as a string instrument by means of bowing and pizzicato effects.

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Pintscher’s music is not, however, restricted to chamber genres: he has written music for orchestra (Fünf Orchesterstücke, 1997) and for ensemble (Choc, 1996), and has also composed for the opera house: Thomas Chatterton was premiered in Dresden (1998) and L’Espace dernier in Paris (2004). Thomas Chatterton, the historical figure, died at the age of seventeen, unable to reconcile reality with his inner world; but Pintscher is more concerned with what Chatterton represents as an idea than with the actual person. He comments: What I find so interesting about the subject is the very concentrated subjective presence of this figure, this young creative being, who is destroyed by his own mediocrity, tries to seek and devise a way out, fails and perishes.103

There are parallels between the topic and its historical distancing with Rihm’s Jakob Lenz, but Thomas Chatterton does not convey the same level of confrontation with the past and does not seek to embody disintegration in such a direct sense. The successful Musik aus Thomas Chatterton (1998) for baritone and orchestra is a score of just over twenty minutes that was extracted from the opera; it carries the drama’s central theme of tormented aspirations. The journalist and musicologist Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich opened a round-table discussion devoted to Pintscher by referring to a review by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, which opined that Pintscher’s music is ‘not significant because it does not introduce anything and does not do away with anything’. Jungheinrich adds: ‘Behind this thesis stands the reproach: no historical intervention.’104 He then goes on to explain that Metzger pits Lachenmann ‘as an exponent of a critical music against Pintscher as an exponent of musical immediacy’, pointing out that this polarity contradicts Lachenmann’s support for the younger figure. (It is worth mentioning in passing that Rihm meets Metzger’s criteria as well as Lachenmann, because his dismissal of formalism was very much a historical intervention.) Pintscher’s indirect response to this critique is that young composers exist in a situation whereby they are aware of the diversity of material available but simultaneously feel a compulsion to innovate that reflects a social tendency, adding that there is also an impulse to express one’s subjectivity. This perspective does not fully rebut Metzger’s argument, but it does insightfully describe a historical context in which people in general, not just composers, are indeed caught between diversity and a drive to modernize. Moreover, it has the additional effect of removing Pintscher from the legacy of Henze’s and Lachenmann’s opposed models of musical material. Given his combined interests in sonority and inclusivity, it is tempting to view Pintscher as a fusion of Rihm and Lachenmann; but it is just as pertinent to observe that composers can now draw on a range of sources without needing to form allegiances.

Epilogue

The three main areas covered in this book are responses to serialism, music and politics, and the reconsideration of tradition. These are the spheres through which a new phase of music in Germany came about following the social transformations of 1968. All three fields are important for understanding Lachenmann: he extends serial techniques so as to make timbre a structural component; he responds to the events of 1968 by creating music that challenges the conventions of bourgeois musical practice; and he reacts to neo-Romanticism, despite his criticisms of it, by entering into dialogue with canonical music. They are also important, in different ways, for comprehending Rihm: he jettisons narrow understandings of serial structure without rejecting all serialist techniques; he recognizes the events of 1968 through an indirect awareness of a social shift; and he is one of the main instigators of the re-engagement with tradition. The latter move is so important that it affects all the composers discussed in this book – by means of denial in the case of Ferneyhough – to the extent that it unravels an established binary opposition between Stockhausen or Lachenmann as avant-garde and Henze as classical by placing the possibilities represented by both tendencies in proximity. Lachenmann’s ‘dialectical structuralism’ would appear to be the antithesis of Rihm’s aesthetic of ‘inclusivity’, to put the two positions at their most reductive. Indeed, there is little point in glossing over the fact that Rihm endeavours to communicate directly through traditional gestures in a way that Lachenmann would never countenance. Nevertheless, the following statement by Lachenmann envisages composition as a form of critical practice in a way that is relevant to Rihm. Dialectical structuralism means: constructing situations, organizing, even improvising them, or stipulating them in the broadest sense, so as to break open or even force open existing, ostensibly intact structures, so as to demonstrate or make perceptible, within a more or less known, trusted or even magically endowed object, something that is unknown and perhaps suppressed.1

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Although Rihm does not seek to break open trusted objects in the structural manner of Lachenmann, the ways that he uses established gestures as part of a sign system do nonetheless serve to reconfigure their meanings. Moreover,

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there is an ongoing interest in the unknown and suppressed in Rihm’s music, especially in the ‘condition-of-music’ pieces such as the Séraphin scores. In addition, both figures encounter the past in the form of rubble, as does the artist Anselm Kiefer, who is able to use actual rubble. Both composers are excellent at conveying their historical contexts in their own terms and at presenting the historical necessity of their own perspectives. For Lachenmann, in particular, telling and retelling the story of Darmstadt seems to have been integral to demonstrating how he was able to shape trends such as timbral composition and historical reflection through structural thinking. Rihm, for his part, is able to articulate a conceptual shift by transferring the idea of complexity from structure to emotion. Moreover, part of this narrating of history involves these composers responding to each other. As seen in Chapter 3, Lachenmann is strongly critical of Rihm’s association with the neo-Romantic tendency because he sees in it an attempt to bring back, in an unreflective manner, the apparatus of bourgeois subjectivity. Rihm, by contrast, is openly critical of the formalist tendencies of the 1950s but is more circumspect in his dealings with Lachenmann. Indeed, it is significant that Rihm agreed to provide an oration on the occasion of Lachenmann winning the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1997 – an event at which it would not have been appropriate to offer a critique of his senior colleague. Nevertheless, he did choose to make Lachenmann’s relationship to tradition the central theme of his speech, as conveyed in the title ‘Grinding away at the Familiar’, thus demonstrating that he has thought carefully about a theme that is so central to both composers. He relates the issue of resisting convention to the matter of sound production in the following way: Lachenmann takes all of the individual tone seriously; he makes his music out of it, from the whole tone, the tone in all its aspects, not only its ‘beautiful’ element. He reminds the listener that the tone is a living entity, something organic, that it has a face, a physiognomy, a shape, a gender.2

This remark leaves little doubt that Rihm finds a creative impulse in Lachenmann which he can direct to his own ends; but at the same time, the vocabulary used is so different to Lachenmann’s that it feels as if Rihm is appropriating his colleague’s preoccupations to his own ends, and thereby resignifying Lachenmann’s music in much the way he does with other traditions. And, beyond this specific comment, there is a subliminal sense in the article that Rihm is indicating that there is another way of doing things: that meanings can be redirected in other ways.

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There is little doubt Rihm recognizes that he and Lachenmann are linked by place and time: ‘For me’, he comments, ‘Helmut Lachenmann is the other facing me and through which I come to myself.’3 Indeed, it may well be the case that this sentiment is not one-sided, despite some of Lachenmann’s comments, judging by a photograph from the 1982 Darmstadt summer course that shows the two figures engaged in intense conversation.4 The search for heightened perception is the issue that is central to both men; and the shared focus on this topic helps to explain why the two composers are drawn to Nono, even though Lachenmann was principally influenced by Nono’s music from the 1950s, whereas Rihm was inspired by his music from the 1980s. It is a fascination with heightened awareness that enables both composers to move away from conceptions of the score as an organism to formulations closer to the associations of intensities envisaged by Deleuze and Guattari. Furthermore, this is the legacy that both composers have passed to a younger generation, even if it is not consciously received in these terms. Habermas’s diagnosis that modernism became disconnected from everyday experience is powerful for finding common ground, because it provides a perspective from which it is possible to see that political music and the expressive music that followed it were attempts to tackle the same problem from two different sides. The latter’s argument that modernism faltered around 1967 ties in conveniently with the view that the first phase of the Darmstadt summer courses ended around 1966. The subsequent years from 1966 to 1980 were, as previously documented, characterized by a political turn in music, and by a renewed interest in the past which flowed into later debates about postmodernism. One of the reasons why the serialism of the 1950s elicited such different responses was that it combined two different impulses: the first was a rationalist intensification of the organicist principle that had arisen in bourgeois music; the second was an attack on the meanings that had accrued to tonal symbols. Seen from this dual perspective, political composers intensify the second impulse and apply its critical force to institutions. Composers who seek to re-engage with tradition, by contrast, can be understood to be fighting against the first impulse. But their reactions to the issue of tonal conventions require nuanced interpretation, because they range from restorations of tonal symbols to attempts to explore, often disruptively, such meanings as components of a mobile sign system. The early 1980s marked a point that stood somewhere between a consolidation of, first, the political and historical tendencies from the 1970s, and second, the start of a new phase of modernism. Between 1980 and 1985 the following scores appeared: Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima (1980),

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Ligeti’s Horn Trio (1982), Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’invenzione I (1982), Rihm’s Fremde Szenen (1984) and Lachenmann’s Ausklang (1985). Furthermore, it was around 1985 that Kagel started to work consistently with the idea of the apocryphal: his Third String Quartet in four movements is a product of 1987, and it reflects on the genre of the quartet just as the later Passé composé invokes the piano repertoire. These pieces share a number of features. They are all modernist (even Fremde Szenen interacts with the modernist impulse of Rihm’s contemporaneous Chiffre scores); they are all among the cornerstones of their respective composers’ outputs; they all initiated, or at least represented, new phases in the careers of their respective composers; and they all responded in different ways to the issue of historical awareness. This last point even applies to Carceri d’invenzione I, because it is an important piece for Ferneyhough’s development of the idea of ‘figure’ which, as the essay ‘Form – Figure – Style’ reveals, was forged partly in an attempt to counteract what the composer viewed as the weakness of historically informed music. Historical reference is certainly significant for Nono’s landmark quartet, because, despite not being directly influenced by the German neo-Romantic composers of the 1970s, it ruminates on the past and takes up the idea of inwardness in a comparable manner. Rihm was quick to recognize a possible connection, and then to build on it by taking from Nono’s music the idea of transferring energy across silences. Moreover, Ligeti, Kagel and Lachenmann all expressed reservations about neo-Romanticism, but the idea of historical reference and its associated engagement with musical subjectivity was a force to which they all responded in individual ways. Other composers found alternatives to Rihm’s practice of double-coding. Yet the hermeneutic dimension he explored remained central to the transition away from the tenets of post-war modernism, as it became clear that the modernism of the 1950s was defined as much by a discourse as by the associated music, despite the narrow technical focus of that music. The fact that composers wrote articles and engaged in polemics indicates that words about music very much contribute to the ways in which it is understood. The crop of scores from the 1980s registered a possibility that had been less coherently present since about 1975: it reasserted, or reinvigorated, modernism after a period of uncertainty, but at the same time its version of modernism was softer, broader and able to absorb what had appeared to be the counter-impulse of historical reflection.5 Indeed, it confused categories by extending the idea of historical reflection to earlier modernist traditions. At any rate, this interpretation is in keeping with Wellmer’s efforts to build on Habermas’s approach to modern aesthetics by arguing that postmodernism

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expanded the interior space of modernity. According to this model, ‘modern art corresponds to a form of subjectivity which no longer displays that rigid unity of the bourgeois subject, but rather the more flexible unity of an individual self that has learned to communicate “in a fluid medium”’. It is, therefore, not just the modern subject that is shaken, but also the ‘systems of meaning in which it had dwelt’.6 Although the ‘fluid medium’ Wellmer invokes is drawn from Habermas’s theory of intersubjective communication, it is not necessary to adopt this framework in order to recognize that musical subjectivity can shape its world, be shaped by its world, and be aware that systems of meaning are not fixed. It would, however, be too neat to claim that the flexible self is the exclusive preserve of the late twentieth century and accordingly to assert that all tonal music is characterized by metaphysical rigidity. A recurring theme in this volume has been the way that composers have turned to Schumann in order to articulate late-twentieth-century subjectivity. In Aus Deutschland, Kagel drew upon Schumann, amongst others, to explore an instability of gender inherent in the lied instead of merely subverting established expectations. Also attracted to something precarious, Killmayer finds in Schumann a hazy inner voice that was obscured by more strident doctrines of modernism. Rihm’s Fremde Szenen are, in turn, clearly influenced by Killmayer’s response to Schumann, but add to it by creating a volatile mix of inner voice and semiotic rubble. Nicolaus A. Huber’s reaction to this composer in his Demijour takes up the idea of a twilight inner world as well, but does so in a manner that does not hesitate to contrast it with the abrupt gestures of awakening, or to dissect the mechanics by which the two states are opposed. Furthermore, Ligeti acknowledges the influence of Schumann’s hemiola patterns, along with African and Hungarian rhythms, on his piano Études. It is worth noting too that Schumann has proved important for the clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann (b. 1973), who has studied with Rihm and who shares Rihm’s interest in music as a medium of memory. The title of Widmann’s Fieberphantasie for piano, string quartet and clarinet (Fever Fantasy, 1999) is a good indication that this composer, like Killmayer and Rihm, responds to the volatile in Schumann; the piece ends with a quotation from the main theme of Schumann’s First Violin Sonata. If Schumann’s yoking together of diverse moods and musical ideas served as a critique of the more controlling forms of nineteenth-century organicism, then it is apposite that this aspect continued to be unsettling when brought into contact with the narrower, construction-focused version of that aesthetic found in high modernism. Schumann proved so fruitful for composers seeking a music more conscious of its own subjectivity at the end

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of the twentieth century, because the expressive resource he offered is unstable, not because it provided certainty in an age of uncertainty. It is notable that Schumann also proved to be an important point of reference for Barthes and for Deleuze and Guattari. As a resource he affords the possibility of retaining a sense of self without it being beholden to a rigid system of meanings. The fascination with Schumann ran in parallel with an increased level of literary interest in Hölderlin, which extended to musical circles. In addition to the sheer quality of Hölderlin’s texts, the reason for this attention is comparable: like Schumann, Hölderlin responded to the demands of dayto-day living by retreating into an emotionally volatile inner realm; for this reason, Killmayer’s description of Schumann as the ‘fremder Mann’ applies equally well to Hölderlin. Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima is a central score for the reception of Hölderlin, with a specific approach to inwardness that was extended to a wider sound world in the same composer’s Prometeo. Ligeti’s Drei Phantasien nach Friedrich Hölderlin for sixteen a cappella voices are significant as well, not least because they stem from the same year (1982) as his Horn Trio – the work that initiated his late style. Moreover, the figure of Hyperion from Hölderlin’s eponymous novel is a staged character in Kagel’s Aus Deutschland, and the fact that he is accompanied by four horns is a firm indicator of his Romantic associations. Hölderlin is important too for the way that Henze engaged with German traditions in his Seventh Symphony. Finally, it is no surprise, given shared interests in Schumann and in Romantic subjectivity in general, that Rihm and Killmayer turned their attentions to Hölderlin. Rihm’s HölderlinFragmente, for voice and piano, address the poet’s inner voice and the turmoil of his mind, whereas for Killmayer it is the childlike qualities of this inner world that form the focus of his songs, as with his responses to Schumann. Particularly significant are Killmayer’s settings from the 1980s: Hölderlin-Lieder I (1982–5) and Hölderlin-Lieder II (1983–7), both for tenor and orchestra. Again, it was left to Huber to adopt a more detached attitude to the model of inwardness in Hölderlin in his An Hölderlin’s Umnachtung. The experience of historical reflection demonstrated that reception can be a far-from-passive experience that can loop back into production. Of the scores mentioned above, the Horn Trio, Fremde Szenen, Kagel’s Quartet and Ausklang all draw not only on existing material, but also on its interpretive networks, thereby moving composition closer to hermeneutic practice. In this way, these creative interpretations of the past feed constructions of modern subjectivity. They also encourage older music to be experienced in a more modern context. With a decline in the prestige of classical music, attacking its practices and institutions no longer has the

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relevance it once had in the 1960s and 1970s. Unpicking this tradition is now rewarding only for what it can offer to a sense of modern subjectivity. It was not just Schumann that modernism encountered at the end of the twentieth century, but also its own early-twentieth-century phase, as demonstrated by Rihm’s evocation of the expressionism of Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg. It is reasonable, therefore, to expect some continuity as well as discontinuity between modernism in its early-, mid- and late-twentiethcentury phases.7 What, however, distinguishes a late-twentieth-century modernism from the post-1945 constructivist model is that it is more accepting of music’s hermeneutic dimension and less bothered about structural integration. In this regard, it is notable that in the pieces mentioned above by Lachenmann, Rihm and Ferneyhough, an expressive but no longer sovereign subject is conveyed as much by intensities as by structures. The historical perspective in German music subsided in the late 1980s, which is a way of saying that as it became mainstream, it attracted less attention. In the 1990s, Lachenmann developed his ‘music with images’ idea, notably in Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, which was no less effective for being a possibly overdue recognition of an existing semantic dimension in his music. Rihm’s style changed in the 1990s too, with the ‘Bewegung’ idea allowing him to link the spatialized signals of earlier scores, sometimes by ‘painting’ over them, as in Vers une symphonie fleuve IV. Furthermore, he was able to mark the new millennium with a significant achievement in Jagden und Formen (2001), which constitutes a culmination of processes harking back to the Chiffre cycle. Rihm’s new opera Dionysos, which was premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2010, also engages productively with established tendencies in his music, bringing the historical and expressionist tendencies of a score such as Jakob Lenz into contact with the music-as-a-state preoccupations of his Artaud works. It combines settings of Nietzsche’s Dionysos-Dithyramben with episodes from the life of Nietzsche, thereby continuing what has been a career-long fascination with this turbulent philosopher. With an age difference of seventeen years between Rihm and Lachenmann, the former is now the leading active composer in Germany by some margin. Moreover, he is the only figure at the height of his powers who registers on the same scale as Stockhausen, his former teacher, to whom he is now positioned to be the rebellious heir. This prominence may have arisen partly because younger composers prefer to be part of more collective trends. Nevertheless, there is not even a dominant tendency at the moment, unless this absence of direction is itself the new context. Furthermore, this situation may itself be a consequence of a prevailing paradigm in which there is no longer a requirement for composers to establish new initiatives. On a practical level, the

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benign post-war funding environment encouraged composers to establish clear identities in order to receive commissions. With such support more limited in the current financial environment, there are fewer opportunities to develop a career in this way. As suggested earlier, if there is something that most of the composers in this book share and that has been passed on, albeit indirectly, as a legacy to the younger generation, it is an interest in heightened perception. When Lachenmann talks of creating a situation, he means a situation in which habits and conventions are altered, thereby enabling a different sort of perception. The idea of heightened perception could, however, become a more inclusive one that enables the listener to deploy strategies not intended by the composer (it happens anyway, whatever the aesthetic environment) and thus to refuse habitual practices in a different way. Such an expanded model holds the prospect of adjusting the imbalance between production and reception that was characteristic of post-war modernism. It would, therefore, be compatible with an enlarged understanding of modernism that enables perception of music to be related to life experiences – again, something that happens anyway whether or not it is acknowledged. The idea of heightened perception also relates to the notion of composition as a form of critical practice, whereby reception can feed into composition. One area in which younger composers are likely to be distinctive is through national or cultural identity. It is arguable that Stockhausen’s interest in systems linked him to a German tradition. Nevertheless, his innovations of the 1950s were tied to the idea of modernism as an international style, an idea that is not compelling in its urge to supplant other styles but does at least look beyond national boundaries. Rihm and Lachenmann, by contrast, are both unambiguously German composers. When the moment for recalling the past came, it was appropriate for them to turn to their own heritage, since it is after all a core part of the classical tradition. Nevertheless, there is the potential for the new music infrastructure in Germany to foster a more international outlook, without adopting the uniformity of globalization. Ligeti and Kagel, two of the major non-Germans covered in this book, are instructive in this regard. Ligeti managed to combine a sense of international avant-gardism with parts of the Austro-German tradition, with Hungarian influences, and with aspects of African polymetre, even if his praxis was conceived primarily in structural terms.8 Kagel, for his part, was prescient in his ability to think in terms of traditions instead of a tradition – even if his approach was sometimes overly forensic – which meant that for him the Austro-German legacy was one among others, including musical styles originating from his native South America. Such an expanded scope

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relates to the previous point about a better balance between reception and production, because being simultaneously inside and outside a tradition requires hermeneutic skills. What a new generation of composers can take from such practices, therefore, is the idea of more porous boundaries between interpretive practice and compositional practice. It seems likely that Germany will remain an international centre for such initiatives.

Notes

Introduction 1. Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘Critical Composition’, trans. Petra Music and Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 565. 2. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Introduction’, trans. Desmond Clayton, in booklet notes to Zeitgenössische Musik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 9 (1970–1980). LP, Harmonia Mundi IC 0761 (1983), 7.

1 Contexts and institutions

[237]

1. See Mary Fulbrook, A Concise History of Germany, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 242–3. 2. Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 107. 3. Thomas, Protest Movements, devotes a chapter to the Dutschke shooting. 4. Thomas, Protest Movements, 123. 5. For a comparison of serialism and structuralism in France, see Edward Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), chapter 6. 6. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 7. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988). 8. This transition is outlined in Ulrich Dibelius, ‘Positions – Reactions – Confusions: The Second Wave of German Music after 1945’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 13–24. 9. Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avantgarde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1986), 172. 10. Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition’, 173–4. 11. See Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 36–41. 12. Herbert Eimert (with contributions from Pierre Boulez, Karel Goeyvaerts, Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen), ‘Junge Komponisten bekennen

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Notes to pages 8–11

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

sich zu Anton Webern [1953]’, in Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–66, 4 vols., ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997), vol. 3, 58–65. Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, trans. Seyla Benhabib, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 6. For a more detailed discussion of Adorno’s ‘Form in the New Music’ and its context, see Alastair Williams, ‘New Music, Late Style: Adorno’s “Form in the New Music”’, Music Analysis 27/2–3 (2008), 193–9. For a chronicle of the summer courses between 1946 and 1966, see Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 3. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Ageing of the New Music’, trans. Robert HullotKentor, in Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 181–202. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Just Who is Growing Old?’, trans. Leo Black, Die Reihe 4 (1960), 63–80. The German title of this essay is ‘Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik’, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 61–89. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Form in the New Music’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Music Analysis 27/2–3 (2008), 209. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 269–322. Adorno, ‘Form in the New Music’, 213. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Form’ and ‘Concluding Remarks’, trans. Stephen Hinton, in Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 248–64. György Ligeti, ‘Form’, trans. Stephen Hinton, in Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music (Essence), 4 vols., ed. Carl Dahlhaus and Ruth Katz (New York: Pendragon Press, 1992), vol. 3, 784. The political tussles of Darmstadt in 1970 and 1972 are conveyed in Klaus Trapp, ‘Darmstadt und die 68er-Bewegung’, in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse 1946–1996, ed. Rudolf Stephan et al. (Stuttgart: DACO Verlag, 1996), 369–75; and in Martin Iddon, ‘Trying to Speak: Between Politics and Aesthetics, Darmstadt, 1970–1972’, TwentiethCentury Music 3/2 (2007), 255–75. Iddon, ‘Trying to Speak’, 262–3. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, trans. Richard Toop, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 47.

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27. Lachenmann to Thomas, 2 December 1971, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. 28. Thomas to Lachenmann, 6 December 1971, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. 29. György Ligeti, ‘On Music and Politics’, trans. Wes Blomster, Perspectives of New Music 16/2 (1978), 24. 30. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Politische und ästhetische Kriterien der Kompositionskritik’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 13 (1973), 15. 31. Quoted in Trapp, ‘Darmstadt und die 68er-Bewegung’, 374. 32. Lachenmann, ‘Zur Frage einer gesellschaftskritischen (-ändernden) Funktion der Musik’, in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 2nd edn, ed. Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004), 98. Ernst Thomas, ‘Von der Notwendigkeit, Ferienkurse für Neue Musik zu veranstalten’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 13 (1973), 13. 33. Eric Drott, ‘Spectralism, Politics and the Post-Industrial Imagination’, in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 57. 34. Christopher Fox, ‘1982–1994: L’Atelier énorme’, in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, 465. This chapter provides an informative overview of Darmstadt in the Hommel era, 461–7. 35. http://www.internationales-musikinstitut.de. 36. Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Interview with Richard Toop’, in Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 251–2. 37. See Ross Feller, ‘E-sketches: Brian Ferneyhough’s Use of Computer-Assisted Compositional Tools’, in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176–88. 38. See Elke Hockings, ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’, Contemporary Music Review 24/1 (2005), 98–9. 39. www.musikrat.de. 40. Quoted, in translation, by Beal, New Music, New Allies, 54. 41. Beal, New Music, New Allies, 53; see also 52–9 in general. 42. See Beal, New Music, New Allies, 252. 43. Ulrich Dibelius, ‘Donaueschingen’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 7, 464–5. 44. http://www.swr.de/swr2/donaueschingen. 45. Marietta Morawska-Büngeler, ‘Donaueschinger Musiktage im Spiegel der Musikkritik (1981–89)’, in Die Musik der achtziger Jahre, ed. Ekkehard Jost (Mainz: Schott, 1990), 108. 46. Michael Struck-Schloen, ‘Hauptstadt-Ruhm mit Rissen: Neue Musik in Köln 1980–1990’, in Neue Musik seit den achtizger Jahren: Eine Dokumentation zum

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

deutschen Musikleben, 2 vols., ed. Martin Thrun (Regensburg: ConBrio, 1994), vol. 2, 155. Björn Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 88. Barbara Barthelmes, ‘Das letzte Jahrzehnt einer Insel-Stadt’, in Neue Musik seit den achtizger Jahren, vol. 2, 119–29. Beal, New Music, New Allies, 250–3. Beal, New Music, New Allies, 235. For extensive information on the composition and production of Roaratorio, see Klaus Schöning (ed.), John Cage, Roaratorio: Ein irischer Circus über Finnegans Wake (Königstein: Athenäum Verlag, 1982). Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘John Cage, or Liberated Music’, trans. Ian Pepper, in John Cage, ed. Julia Robinson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 1–16. Europeras 1 and 2 constitute a focus in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds.), Musik-Konzepte Sonderband: John Cage II (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1990). Irvine Arditti, ‘Irvine Arditti in Interview with Max Nyfeller’, in Programme for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (1999), 51. Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Shattering the Vessels of Received Wisdom: In Conversation with James Boros’, in Collected Writings, 370. See Reinhard Oehlschlägel, ‘Instrumentalensemblemusik und Instrumentalensembles in Deutschland’, in Neue Musik seit den achtizger Jahren, 23–30.

2 Expanded horizons: established composers after 1968 1. György Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Joseph Häusler’, trans. Sarah E. Soulsby, in Ligeti in Conversation (London: Eulenburg, 1983), 89. 2. György Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Ligeti’, trans. Geoffrey Skelton, in Ligeti in Conversation, 127. 3. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5: Music in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 50, 53. 4. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, trans. Richard Toop, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 45. 5. György Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Péter Várnai’, trans. Gabor J. Schabert, in Ligeti in Conversation, 75. 6. Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Joseph Häusler’, 93, 95. 7. For an account of this re-evaluation in the 1970s, see Jonathan Bernard, ‘Ligeti’s Restoration of Interval and its Significance for his Later Works’, Music Theory Spectrum 21/1 (1999), 1–31. 8. See Richard Steinitz, György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber, 2003), 248; and Anders Beyer, The Voice of Music: Conversations with Composers of our Time (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000), 8. 9. Steinitz, György Ligeti, 251. 10. György Ligeti, ‘Chamber Music’, trans. David Feuzeig and Annelies McVoy, in booklet notes to György Ligeti Edition: Chamber Music. CD, Sony 01–062309–10 (1998), p. 14.

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11. Eric Drott, ‘Triadic Harmony in Ligeti’s Recent Music’, Music Analysis 22/3 (2003), 290. 12. György Ligeti, ‘On my Études for Piano’, trans. Sid McLauchlan, Sonus: A Journal of Investigations into Global Musical Possibilities 9/1 (1988), 4. 13. György Ligeti, ‘Études’, trans. David Feuzeig and Annelies McVoy, in booklet notes to György Ligeti Edition: Works for Piano. CD, Sony 01–062308–10 (1998), 11–12. 14. Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Péter Várnai’, 74. 15. Ligeti relates that von Dadelson has managed to find unintended references to the prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal in Lontano: ‘Ligeti – Péter Várnai’, 55–6. Rihm notes that he did not consider studying with Ligeti, probably because the latter was located in north Germany. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘ . . . zu wissen: Gespräch mit Rudolf Frisius’, in Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, 2 vols., ed. Ulrich Mosch (Mainz: Schott, 1997), vol. 2, 133. 16. Ligeti, ‘Ligeti – Péter Várnai’, 78. 17. Arnold Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204–7. 18. Ligeti, ‘Chamber Music’, 14. 19. Ligeti, ‘Chamber Music’, 14. 20. Luigi Nono, ‘Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik heute’, in Luigi Nono: Texte – Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. Jürg Stenzl (Zurich: Atlantis, 1975), 34–40. 21. Luigi Nono, ‘ . . . sofferte onde serene . . . (1976)’, in booklet notes to Luigi Nono, Das atmende Klarsein, . . . sofferte onde serene . . . , Con Luigi Dallapiccola, trans. Steven Lindberg. CD, col legno 31871 (1994), 15. 22. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Wendepunkt Quartet?’, Musik-Konzepte 20: Luigi Nono, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1981), 93. 23. Luigi Nono, Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima (Milan: Ricordi, 1980). 24. The poems used in Fragmente – Stille are reproduced in full in Werner Linden, Luigi Nonos Weg zum Streichquartett (Kassell: Bärenreiter, 1989). 25. Michael Hamburger, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994), xxi. 26. Friedrich Hölderlin, ‘If from the Distance’, in Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 655. The German in this edition is ‘das Weist aber du nicht’, 657. 27. Hermann Danuser, ‘Innerlichkeit und Äußerlichkeit in der Musikästhetik der Gegenwart’, Die Musik der achtziger Jahre, ed. Ekkehard Jost (Mainz: Schott, 1990), 17–29. 28. Rihm relates that when he first met Nono in 1980, the latter listened to his music for hours on end. ‘Con Luigi Nono I’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 313. Carola Nielinger-Vakil also notes connections between Nono’s quartet and Rihm’s Hölderlin-Fragmente, in ‘Quiet Revolutions: Hölderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm’, Music & Letters 81/2 (2000), 245–74. 29. Rihm, ‘Con Luigi Nono I’, 314.

242

Notes to pages 35–46

30. Lydia Jeschke, ‘Ambition (and) Modesty: Luigi Nono’s Prometeo on the Point of Departure for the New’, trans. Steven Lindberg, in booklet notes to Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto. CD, col legno, WWE 2SACD 20605 (2007), 25. 31. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, Contemporary Music Review 18/1 (1999), 26. 32. Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, 27, 28. 33. Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, 29. 34. Luigi Nono, ‘Das atmende Klarsein (1980/81)’, in booklet notes to Luigi Nono, Das atmende Klarsein, 14. 35. Mauricio Kagel, Preface to Ludwig van: Hommage von Beethoven (London: Universal Edition, 1970), viii. 36. Björn Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 103. 37. Mauricio Kagel, ‘Excerpts from the Film Script’, trans. Richard Toop, in booklet notes to The Maurico Kagel Edition. DVD, Winter & Winter 910 128–2, 2006, 50. 38. Kagel, Preface to Ludwig van, ix. 39. Reviews are cited in Esteban Buch, Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History, trans. Richard Miller (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 230–1. 40. Kagel quoted in Werner Klüppelholz, Maurico Kagel: 1970–1980 (Cologne: DuMont, 1981), 226. 41. The tableau vivant idea is mentioned by Kagel, as quoted in Klüppelholz, Maurico Kagel, 226. 42. For a brief synopsis of all the tableaux, see Klüppelholz, Mauricio Kagel, 226–30. 43. Lawrence Kramer, Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 69. 44. Quoted in Klüppelholz, Mauricio Kagel, 129. 45. Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel, 139. 46. Mauricio Kagel, ‘Piano Works’, trans. Susan Marie Praeder, in booklet notes to Mauricio Kagel: Piano Works. 2 CDs, cpo 999 965–2 (2003), 9. 47. Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel, 140. 48. For a similar point, see Paul Attinello, ‘Imploding the System: Kagel and the Deconstruction of Modernism’, in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 283. 49. For more on für stimmen, see Paul Attinello, ‘Dialectics of Serialism: Abstraction and Serialism in Schnebel’s für stimmen ( . . . missa est)’, Contemporary Music Review 26/1 (2007), 39–52. 50. Ulrich Dibelius, ‘Positions – Reactions – Confusions: The Second Wave of German Music after 1945’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 20. 51. Dieter Schnebel, ‘Die Tradition des Fortschritts und der Fortschritt der Tradition’, in Dieter Schnebel, Anschläge – Ausschläge (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1993), 121. 52. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 53. Dieter Schnebel, in booklet notes to Dieter Schnebel, Re-Visionen, trans. W. Richard Rieves. CD, Wergo 6616–2 (1998), 12.

Notes to pages 46–56

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

243

Sammlung Dieter Schnebel, Paul Sacher Stiftung. Dieter Schnebel, Schubert-Phantasie (Mainz: Schott, 1979), 3. Schnebel, Schubert-Phantasie, 3. Schnebel, in booklet notes to Re-Visionen, 16. Rihm, ‘Der Taumel der Gegensätze im Gleichgewicht: Gespräch mit Sylvia Ragni’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 214. Quoted in Hans-Christian Schmidt, ‘What Does “The Sphericality of Time” Mean in the Works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann?’, trans. Clive R. Williams, in booklet notes to Die Soldaten. 2 CDs, Teldec 9031–72775 (1991), 37. For more on collage in Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu, see Catherine Losada, ‘The Process of Modulation in Musical Collage’, Music Analysis 27/2–3 (2008), 295–336. Bernd Alois Zimmermann, quoted in ‘Concerning the Text Synopsis’, in booklet notes to Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. CD, WER 60180–50 (1989), 24. For discussion of a sketch for a happening in the Zimmermann archive, see Klaus Ebbeke, Zeitschichtung: Gesammelte Aufsätze zum Werk von Bernd Alois Zimmermann (Mainz: Schott, 1998), 96. Quoted in Klaus Ebbeke, ‘To the Genesis of the Work’, trans. W. Richard Rieves, in booklet notes to Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. CD, WER 60180–50 (1989), 15. See Ebbeke, ‘To the Genesis of the Work’, 16. Zimmerman stated, ‘Language itself is treated in many different ways in the various parts of the piece. Single words are nevertheless retained in their entirety.’ Zimmermann quoted in ‘Concerning the Text Synopsis’, 24. Quoted in Ebbeke, ‘To the Genesis of the Work’, 16. For a diagrammatic representation of the text collages, see Elisabeth J. Birks, ‘Textstruktur’, in booklet notes to Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. CD, Wergo 60180–50 (1989), 26–61. Wilhelm Killmayer, ‘Gegenwärtige Gedanken zum Rückblick auf eine Zukunft. Fast hundert Jahre Neue Musik’, in Wiederaneignung und Neubestimmung: Der Fall Postmoderne in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal Edition, 1993), 12. Wilhelm Killmayer, Schumann in Endenich (Mainz: Schott, 1974), 4. Jörn Peter Hiekel, ‘Reduktionismus und Perspektivenreichtum: Anmerkungen zu Schumann in Endenich von Wilhelm Killmayer’, in Musik-Konzepte 144/145: Wilhelm Killmayer, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009), 88–98. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Wer sich am Grat aufhält, weiß um den Absturz: Notizen zu Wilhelm Killmayers Poèmes symphoniques’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 334. Wilhelm Killmayer, ‘Zu Wolfgang Rihms Klavierstück Nr. 6 (Bagatellen)’, in Klaviermusik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wilhelm Killmayer, Siegfried Mauser and Wolfgang Rihm, Melos: Jahrbuch für zeitgenössische Musik 51 (1992), 102–29. Wilhelm Killmayer, Nachtgedanken (Mainz: Schott, 1973), p. 7. Elaine Kelly, ‘Composing the Canon: The Individual and the Romantic Aesthetic in the GDR’, in Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR, ed. Matthew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle, Edinburgh German Yearbook 3 (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2009), 201.

244

Notes to pages 56–63

75. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Ludwig van Beethoven: Six Bagatelles for Piano, op. 126’, in Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 1998), 130. This essay from 1934 was not published until 1984. 76. Mathias Hansen (ed.), Komponieren zur Zeit: Gespräche mit Komponisten der DDR (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1988), 27. 77. Quoted in Frank Schneider, ‘Reiner Bredemeyer’, trans. J. Berridge and M. Berridge, in booklet notes to Neue Musik in der DDR, vol. 3. CD, Nova 0013032BC (2002), 28. Adorno, ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’, in Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, 124. This essay from 1934 was included in Moments musicaux, 1964. 78. Adorno, ‘Beethoven’s Late Style’, 123. 79. Utz Riese, ‘Postmodern Culture: Symptom, Critique, or Solution to the Crisis of Modernity? An East German Perspective’, New German Critique 57 (1992), 162. 80. Hans Werner Henze, ‘German Music in the 1940s and 1950s’, in Music and Politics: Collected Writings 1953–81, trans. Peter Labanyi (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 38, 40. 81. Henze, ‘German Music in the 1940s and 1950s’, 43. 82. Henze, ‘Art and the Revolution’, in Music and Politics, 179. 83. See Henze, ‘Does Music Have to be Political?’, in Music and Politics, 168; and Hans Werner Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 243–8. 84. See Stephen Downes, ‘Hans Werner Henze as Post-Mahlerian: Anachronism, Freedom and the Erotics of Intertextuality’, Twentieth-Century Music 1/2 (2004), 179–207. 85. Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 207. 86. Henze, ‘Tristan’, in Music and Politics, 222. 87. Henze, ‘Tristan’, in Music and Politics, 226. 88. Henze, ‘Tristan’, in Music and Politics, 223–4. 89. The meaning of this distortion is considered in Stephen Downes, ‘Supremacy, Debasement, and Symbolic Investiture in Lawrence Kramer’s Modern “Opera”: A Review of Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss’, Twentieth-Century Music 2/2 (2006), 283–4. 90. Henze, ‘Tristan’, in Music and Politics, 227. 91. Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 123. 92. Hans Werner Henze, Tristan (Mainz: Schott, 1973), 154. 93. Henze, ‘Tristan’, in Music and Politics, 228–9. 94. Stephen Downes, Hans Werner Henze: Tristan (1973) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 122. 95. Hans Werner Henze, ‘An Interview with Oliver Knussen Introducing the Henze Collection’, in booklet notes to The Henze Collection: 2. Konzert für Klavier und Orchester, Tristan. 2 CDs, Deutsche Grammophon 449 868–2 (1996), 7.

Notes to pages 63–73

96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

245

Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 57. Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music, 127–42. Henze, Bohemian Fifths, 162. A transcript of the recorded exchange between the two composers is included in an appendix to Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’, trans. Jeffrey Stadelman, Perspectives of New Music 35/2 (1997), 189–200. Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter’, 198. Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter’, 191. Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter’, 192. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Affect und Aspekt’, in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 2nd edn, ed. Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004), 63–71. Rihm, ‘Rückkehr zur Unordnung? Gespräch mit Luca Lombardi’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 60. Rihm, ‘Laudatio auf Karlheinz Stockhausen’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 325–6. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music, ed. Robin Maconie (London: Marion Boyars, 1989), 122. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Aus den sieben Tagen (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1968), 11, 25. Richard Toop, ‘Concept and Context: A Historiographic Consideration of Lachenmann’s Orchestral Works’, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 130. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 46. Stockhausen, Stockhausen on Music, 118–19. See Martin Iddon, ‘The Haus that Karlheinz Built: Composition, Authority, and Control at the 1968 Darmstadt Ferienkurse’, Musical Quarterly 87/1 (2004), 94–5. Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 331. Rihm, ‘Laudatio auf Karlheinz Stockhausen’, 326. Arnold Whittall, Serialism (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 212. Rudolf Frisius, Karlheinz Stockhausen, II: Die Werke 1950–1977 (Mainz: Schott, 2008), 277. Peter Andraschke, ‘Kompositorische Tendenzen bei Karlheinz Stockhausen seit 1965’, in Zur ‘Neuen Einfachheit’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981), 141. Rihm, ‘Laudatio auf Karlheinz Stockhausen’, 326. Jerome Kohl, ‘Into the Middleground: Formula Syntax in Stockhausen’s Licht’, Perspectives of New Music 28/2 (1990), 278. Maconie, Other Planets, 417. Stockhausen, Towards Cosmic Music, trans. Tim Nevill (Longmead, Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1989), 107, 106. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Aging of the New Music’, trans. Robert HullotKentor and Fredric Will, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 181–202.

246

Notes to pages 73–83

121. Quoted in Maconie, Other Planets, 411. 122. Jürgen Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985).

3 The refusal of habit: Helmut Lachenmann 1. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, Contemporary Music Review 18/1 (1999), 21. 2. In an interview from 1993, Lachenmann refers directly to Pierre Schaeffer: ‘Paradiese auf Zeit: Gespräch mit Peter Szendy’, 211. In an interview from 1971, Lachenmann explains the idea of ‘musique concrète instrumentale’: ‘Werkstatt-Gespräch mit Ursula Stürzbecher’, 149–51. Both interviews are contained in Helmut Lachenmann, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 2nd edn, ed. Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004). Hereafter referred to as MaeE. 3. Richard Toop, ‘Concept and Context: A Historiographic Consideration of Lachenmann’s Orchestral Works’, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 130. 4. Björn Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 49. 5. Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation: Gedanken und Praktiken eines Komponisten’, in MaeE, 102. 6. Lachenmann also recalls that Pression was written during the interregnum, a comment that conflicts with the date (1969/70) given for Pression, but which serves to link the cello writing in both scores: Lachenmann, ‘Paradiese auf Zeit’, 210. 7. Lachenmann, ‘Notturno für kleines Orchester mit Violoncello solo’, in MaeE, 379. 8. Helmut Lachenmann, Notturno (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1981), viii. 9. Lachenmann, ‘temA für Flöte, Stimme und Violoncello’, in MaeE, 378. 10. Lachenmann, ‘temA für Flöte, Stimme und Violoncello’, 378. 11. Helmut Lachenmann, Pression: Für einen Cellisten (Cologne: Hans Gerig [assigned to Breitkopf & Härtel], 1972), Preface. 12. Lachenmann, ‘Pression für einen Cellisten’, in MaeE, 381. The German word ‘Geräusch’ does not carry the same negative connotations as the English translation of it as ‘noise’. 13. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos – ohne Hören: Über Möglichkeiten und Schwierigkeiten’, in MaeE, 125. 14. Lachenmann, ‘Paradiese auf Zeit, 211. 15. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 124. 16. Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation’, 102. 17. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 124. 18. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 125. 19. Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation’, 102. 20. Lachenman, ‘Paradiese auf Zeit’, 212. 21. Rainer Nonnenmann, Angebot durch Verweigerung: Die Ästhetik instrumentalkonkreten Klangkomponierens in Helmut Lachenmanns Orchesterwerken

Notes to pages 83–91

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

247

(Mainz: Schott, 2000), 67. For more on Benno Ohnesorg and Rudi Dutschke, see the first section of Chapter 1 in the present volume. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, trans. Richard Toop, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 46–7. Toop, ‘Concept and Context’, 133. Toop also notes the parallel with Requiem für einen jungen Dichter. Lachenmann made this association in a conversation with Nonnenman in 1998. Nonnenman, Angebot durch Verweigerung, 108. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, Tempo 135 (1980), 22. The German title ‘Zum Problem des musikalisch Schönen heute’ translates better as ‘On the Problem of the Musically Beautiful Today’; in MaeE, 104–10. Lachenmann, ‘Bedingungen des Materials: Stichworte zur Praxis der Theoriebildung’, in MaeE, 46. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, Contemporary Music Review 12 (1995), 98. Lachenmann, ‘Schwankungen am Rand. Musik für Blech und Saiten’, in MaeE, 389. Helmut Lachenmann, Accanto: Musik für einen Klarinettisten mit Orchester (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1984), ‘Instrumentation’. Nonnenmann, Angebot durch Verweigerung, 262–88. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 145; here ‘Sprachcharakter’ is translated as ‘linguistic character’. Adorno, ‘Music, Language, and Composition’, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, 118. Adorno’s ideas on music, language and avant-gardism are discussed in Albrecht Wellmer, ‘On Music and Language’, trans. Wieland Hoban, in Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven University Press, 2004), 71–131. Lachenmann, ‘Accanto’ (1982), in MaeE, 169. Lachenmann, ‘Accanto’ (1982), 176. Lachenmann, ‘Accanto’ (1982), 175–6. Nonnenman, Angebot durch Verweigerung, 279. Lachenmann, Accanto, 47. This instruction is hard to understand because Lachenmann wrote ‘Bitte brazu das Zitat’; and ‘brazu’ is not a known German word. However, since a sentence shouted into a tuba is likely to be incomprehensible anyway, it is probable that Lachenmann invented the word ‘brazu’ for phonetic and rhythmic effect. Helmut Lachenmann, Accanto, Consolation I, Kontrakadenz. CD, Wergo 6738 2 (2010). Accanto was recorded in 1977 and the original LP version of the above CD was released in 1985. The score of Accanto does not contain special instructions for the solo clarinettist, other than those written in as the music progresses. However, the score of Lachenmann’s Dal niente (Interieur III), for solo clarinettist (1970), does

248

Notes to pages 91–101

40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

offer directions for the instrumentalist which can be usefully consulted in relation to Accanto. Lachenmann, ‘Über Tradition’, in MaeE, 340. Lachenmann, ‘Accanto’ (1976), in MaeE, 390. Abigail Heathcote, ‘Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann’, in Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 342. Metzger’s argument is also considered in Chapter 2. For a more extended consideration of the ways in which Accanto relates to the cultural and ideological cross-currents of its time and location, see Alastair Williams, ‘Mixing with Mozart: Aesthetics and Tradition in Helmut Lachenmann’s Accanto’, Twentieth-Century Music 8/1 (2011), 71–97. Lachenmann refers directly to Georg Lukács’s aesthetics, quoting Marx’s aphorism which stands at the front of the volume: Lachenmann, ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, 24. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1973), 317–19. This book from 1937 was published in German translation in 1966. Christopher Caudwell was a pseudonym taken on by Christopher St. John Sprigg. Lachenmann, ‘Struktur and Musikantik’, in MaeE, 155. Lachenmann, ‘Struktur and Musikantik’, 155. Lachenmann, ‘Zur Frage einer gesellschaftskritischen (-ändernden) Funktion der Musik’, in MaeE, 98. Lachenmann, ‘Salut für Caudwell. Musik für zwei Gitarristen’, in MaeE, 391. Lachenmann, ‘Struktur and Musikantik’, 157. Heathcote, ‘Sound Structures’, 335. Lachenmann, ‘Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied. Musik für Orchester mit Streichquartett’, in MaeE, 393. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Bach Defended against his Devotees’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 133–46. Lachenmann, ‘Siciliano – Abbildungen und Kommentarfragmente’, in MaeE, 178. Lachenmann, ‘Siciliano’, 178. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 129. Lachenmann, ‘Hören ist wehrlos’, 130–1. Pietro Cavallotti, Differenzen: Poststrukturalistiche Aspekte in der Musik der 1980er Jahre am Beispiel von Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough and Gérard Grisey (Schlienge: Edition Argus, 2006), 127. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 98. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 98. Lachenmann, ‘Ein Kinderspiel. Sieben kleine Stücke für Klavier’, in MaeE, 394. Lachenmann, ‘Vom Greifen und Begreifen – Versuch für Kinder’, in MaeE, 162–7. Lachenmann, ‘Vom Greifen und Begreifen’, 165.

Notes to pages 102–10

249

65. Lachenmann, ‘Vom Greifen und Begreifen’, 165. 66. Martin Scherzinger, ‘Music in the Thought of Deconstruction/Deconstruction in the Thought of Music’, Musicological Annual 2 (2005), 99–101. 67. For a table of sections in the score, see Elke Hockings, ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’, Contemporary Music Review 24/1 (2005), 94. 68. Lachenmann, ‘Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung) für Ensemble’, in MaeE, 396. 69. Lachenmann, ‘Musik als existentielle Erfahrung’, in MaeE, 221. 70. Lachenmann, ‘Ausklang. Musik für Klavier mit Orchester’, in MaeE, 397. 71. Lachenmann, ‘Nicht mit Beethoven und nicht vor Späth’, in MaeE, 186–90. 72. Lachenmann, ‘Staub. Für Orchester’, in MaeE, 398. 73. For a more detailed study of Staub, see Rainer Nonnenmann, Beethoven und Helmut Lachenmanns ‘Staub’ für Orchester, Fragmen 33 (Saarbrücken: PFAUVerlag, 2000). 74. Lachenmann, ‘Staub’, 398. 75. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘On my Second String Quartet’, trans. Evan Johnson, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 60. 76. Lachenmann, ‘Zweites Streichquartett (Reigen seliger Geister)’, in MaeE, 401; and Lachenmann, ‘On my Second String Quartet’, 64. 77. Cavallotti, Differenzen, 79. 78. Lachenmann, ‘On my Second String Quartet’, 70. 79. Lachenmann, ‘On my Second String Quartet’, 70. 80. Lachenmann, ‘Tableau. Stück für Orchester’, in MaeE, 400. 81. Lachenmann, ‘Tableau’, 400. 82. For more on conventions in Tableau, see Rainer Nonnenmann, ‘Music with Images – The Development of Helmut Lachenmann’s Sound Composition between Concretion and Transcendence’, trans. Wieland Hoban, Contemporary Music Review 24/1 (2005), 17. 83. Lachenmann, ‘Les Consolations’, in MaeE, 392. Lachenmann, ‘Siciliano’, 185. 84. Lachenmann, ‘Selbstportrait 1975’, in MaeE, 154. 85. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Selbstportrait 1975/2001’, in Programme for Staatsoper Stuttgart: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (2001), 14–19. 86. I have followed the numbering used in Paul Griffiths, ‘It is Cold’, in booklet notes to Lachenmann, Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. 2 CDs, ECM 1858 (2004), 9–15. However, this sequence is somewhat at variance in Part II with the score, which has fewer numbers but more subdivisions. I am grateful to Breitkopf & Härtel for providing me with a copy of the unpublished score of Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern. 87. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, in Programme for Staatsoper Stuttgart, 6. 88. David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201. 89. Lachenmann, ‘Klänge sind Naturereignisse: Gespräch mit Klaus Zehelein und Hans Thomalla’, in Programme for Staatsoper Stuttgart, 29. 90. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 6.

250

Notes to pages 111–19

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121.

Lachenmann, ‘Selbstportrait 1975/2001’, 18. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 7. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 8. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 8. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 8. Nonnenmann, ‘Music with Images’, 24. Martin Kaltenecker, ‘Musik mit Bildern’, in Programme for Staatsoper Stuttgart, 43. Lachenmann, ‘Eine musikalische Handlung’, 8. Ensslin received multiple life sentences for terrorist activities. She was found hanged in her Stammheim prison cell in 1977. Lachenmann, ‘Paradiese auf Zeit’, 210. See Nonnenmann, ‘Music with Images’, 18. Lachenmann, ‘Klänge sind Naturereignisse’, 22. Lachenmann, ‘Klänge sind Naturereignisse’, 21. For more on the topic of coldness in this work, see Thomas Schäfer, ‘Musik aus der Eiskammer der Gesellschaft: Über das Motiv der Kälte anlässlich von Helmut Lachenmanns Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’, in Nachgedachte Musik: Studien zum Werk von Helmut Lachenmann, ed. Jörn Peter Hiekel and Siegfried Mauser (Wiesbaden: PFAU-Verlag, 2005), 128–36. Lachenmann, ‘The “Girl”, (Ensslin) and Leonardo’, trans. Eileen WalliserSchwarzbart, in booklet notes to recording of Das Mädchen, 25. Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Arundel, quoted in booklet notes to Das Mädchen, 14. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘ . . . Zwei Gefühle . . . ’, Musik mit Leonardo (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1992), ‘Instructions for the Speakers’. Lachenmann, ‘“ . . . Zwei Gefühle . . . ”, Musik mit Leonardo’, in MaeE, 402. Lachenmann, ‘“ . . . Zwei Gefühle . . . ”, Musik mit Leonardo’, 402. Lachenmann, ‘The “Girl”’, 26. Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1981), 91. Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 58. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 93. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 94. Lachenmann, ‘Affekt und Aspekt’, in MaeE, 70. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 95. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 45. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 46, 47. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 48. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 93. Lachenmann, ‘Affekt und Aspekt’, 69. This translation follows the quotation from this essay in Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 49. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 48.

Notes to pages 119–25

251

122. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 93. 123. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 93. 124. Lachenmann, ‘Philosophy of Composition – Is There Such a Thing?’, trans. Wieland Hoban, in Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven University Press, 2004), 67. 125. Lachenmann, ‘Touched by Nono’, 27. 126. Lachenmann, ‘Paradiese auf Zeit’, 211. 127. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’, trans. Jeffrey Stadelman, Perspectives of New Music 35/2 (1997), 191. 128. Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation’, 102. 129. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 100. 130. Ulrich Mosch, ‘Kunst als vom Geist beherrschte Magie: Zu einem Aspekt von Helmut Lachenmanns Musikbegriff’, in Musik-Konzepte 146: Helmut Lachenmann, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2009), 76–96. 131. Heathcote, ‘Sound Structures’, 342–3. 132. Heathcote, ‘Sound Structures’, 334. 133. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 98. Benjamin’s concept of aura is mentioned in Lachenmann, ‘Bedingungen des Materials’, 46. 134. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 179–89. 135. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester University Press, 1984). 136. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Tradition’, Telos 94 (1993–4), 82. 137. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 44. 138. Lachenmann, ‘Open Letter to Hans Werner Henze’, 190. 139. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 128, 156–7. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 20–7. 140. Lachenmann, ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, 21. 141. Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Über Negativität, Autonomie und Welthaltigkeit der Musik oder: Musik als existenzielle Erfahrung’, in Der Atem des Wanderers: Der Komponist Helmut Lachenmann, ed. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (Frankfurt am Main: Schott, 2006), 141. 142. Paul Steenhuisen, ‘Interview with Helmut Lachenmann – Toronto, 2003’, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 14. 143. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 19. 144. Lachenmann, ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, 20.

4 Music and signs: Wolfgang Rihm 1. Wolfgang Rihm, Musik für drei Streicher (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1977), iv. These words are a modified version of a comment made in an essay written in

252

Notes to pages 125–34

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

1978: Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Ins eigene Fleish . . . (Lose Blätter über das Jungerkomponistsein)’, in Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, 2 vols. ed. Ulrich Mosch (Mainz: Schott, 1997), vol. 1, 119. Rihm, ‘In Conversation with Kirk Noreen and Joshua Cody’, The Ensemble Sospeso. New York. www.sospeso.com/contents/articles/rihm (2000). Rihm, ‘In den Spiegel gelauscht . . . ’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 285. Joseph Häusler, ‘Rihm, Wolfgang’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 21, 387. Rihm, ‘Über Dis-Kontur: Notizen zu einem Vortrag’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 291. Rihm, ‘Dis-Kontur für großes Orchestra (1974)’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 290. Rihm, ‘Anläßlich Sub-Kontur’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 298. Wolf Frobenius, ‘Die “Neue Einfachheit” und der bürgerliche Schönheitsbegriff’, in Zur ‘Neuen Einfachheit’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna and Graz: Universal Edition, 1981), 54–5. Frobenius, ‘Die “Neue Einfachheit”’, 53, 59n–60. Rihm, ‘In Conversation with Kirk Noreen and Joshua Cody’. Rihm, ‘Einige Gedanken zur Karlsruher Uraufführung der Zweiten Abgesangsszene’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 317. See Thomas Schäfer, ‘Anwesend/abgekehrt: Notizen zu Wolfgang Rihms Komponieren der 1970er Jahre mit Blick auf Gustav Mahler’, in MusikKonzepte Sonderband: Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Ulrich Taddy (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2004), 99–108. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 48. Peter Andraschke notes the Beethoven quotation. ‘Traditionsmomente in Kompositionen von Cristóbal Halffter, Klaus Huber und Wolfgang Rihm’, in Die neue Musik und die Tradition, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann (Mainz: Schott, 1978), 141. Rihm, ‘In Conversation with Kirk Noreen and Joshua Cody’. Joachim Brügge, ‘Zur Form und Ästhetik in Wolfgang Rihms drittem Streichquartett Im Innersten (1976)’, Die Musikforschung 52/2 (1999), 186. Rihm, ‘Im Innersten, Drittes Streichquartett’, Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 305. Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘Wirkungen Beethovens in der Kammermusik’, in Beiträge zu Beethovens Kammermusik: Symposion Bonn 1984, ed. Sieghard Brandenburg and Helmut Loos (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1987), 81–4, 105–8. Joachim Brügge, Wolfgang Rihm’s Streichquartette: Aspekte zu Analyse, Ästhetik und Gattungstheorie des modernen Streichquartetts (Saarbrücken: PFAU-Verlag, 2004), 207. Brügge, Wolfgang Rihm’s Streichquartette, 207. The sketches for the Fourth Quartet are discussed in Brügge, Wolfgang Rihm’s Streichquartette, 212–81. Rihm, ‘Spur, Faden. Zur Theorie des musikalischen Handwerks’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 73.

Notes to pages 134–47

253

23. Rihm, ‘Musik vor Bildern’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 418. 24. Rihm, ‘Con Luigi Nono’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 311–20. This essay is also discussed in Chapter 2 of the present volume. 25. Quoted in Ivan Hewett, ‘Fetzen I–VIII’, in Programme for BBC Symphony Orchestra, Total Immersion: Wolfgang Rihm (2010), 11. 26. Rihm, ‘Tasten’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 420. 27. Rihm, ‘Klavierstück Nr. 4’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 287–8. 28. Rihm, ‘Klavierstück Nr. 6 (Bagatellen)’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 315. 29. Rihm, ‘Tasten’, 420. 30. For a detailed study of Klavierstück Nr. 6, see Wilhelm Killmayer, ‘Zu Wolfgang Rihms Klavierstück Nr. 6 (Bagatellen)’, in Klaviermusik des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Wilhelm Killmayer, Siegfried Mauser and Wolfgang Rihm, Melos: Jahrbuch für zeitgenössische Musik 51 (1992), 102–29. 31. Rihm, ‘Tasten’, 420. 32. Rihm, ‘Tasten’, 420. 33. Carola Nielinger-Vakil, ‘Quiet Revolutions: Hölderlin Fragments by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Rihm’, Music & Letters 81/2 (2000), 268. 34. John Daverio, Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology (New York: Schirmer Books, 1993), 87. 35. Rihm, ‘Hölderlin-Fragmente für Singstimme und Klavier, I. Fassung’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 308. 36. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 26–9. 37. Wolfgang Rihm, Wölfli-Liederbuch (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981), 18. 38. For a more extensive discussion of Rihm’s Fremde Szenen, see Alastair Williams, ‘Swaying with Schumann: Subjectivity and Tradition in Wolfgang Rihm’s Fremde Szenen I–III and Related Scores’, Music & Letters 87/3 (2006), 379–97. 39. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 23–39; ‘Fremde Blätter (über Robert Schumann)’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 229–33; ‘Auch über Robert Schumann’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 234–6. 40. Rihm conveys his ambivalence by writing ‘no programme text from 1st September 1985’, after his comments on Fremde Szenen. Rihm, ‘Fremde Szenen I–III, Versuche für Klaviertrio, erste Folge’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 333. This enigmatic statement confirms that the transition from music to text may not always be smooth, even for a composer with Rihm’s literary skills. 41. Joseph Häusler claimed there is a Schumann quotation in Fremde Szene II, although it is neither identified nor located. ‘Profil Wolfgang Rihm – ein Versuch’, in Programme for Berliner Festwochen (1997), 35. 42. Rihm, ‘Fremde Blätter’, 230. 43. Rihm, ‘Fremde Szenen I–III’, 333. 44. Rihm, ‘Fremde Szenen I–III’, 333. 45. Rihm, ‘Fremde Blätter’, 230. 46. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 23.

254

Notes to pages 147–59

47. Rihm, ‘Auch über Robert Schumann’, 235. 48. Rihm, ‘Musik – das innere Ausland’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 403–15. See also Rihm, ‘Fremde Blätter’, 230. 49. Rihm, ‘Fremde Szenen I–III’, 333. 50. Rihm, ‘Anläßlich Sub-Kontur’, 298. 51. Rihm, ‘Chiffren von Verstörung. Anmerkungen zu Jakob Lenz’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 314–15. 52. Rihm, ‘Erscheinung, Skizze über Schubert für neuen Streicher und Klavier ad libitum’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 311–13. 53. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 23. 54. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 31. 55. Rihm, ‘Notizen zum Chiffre-Zyklus’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 343; Rihm, ‘Chiffre I – Silence to be Beaten (Chiffre II) – Chiffre III’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 331. 56. Rihm, ‘Chiffre I für Klavier und sieben Instrumente’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 328; Rihm, ‘Notizen zum Chiffre–Zyklus’, 343. 57. Rihm, ‘Notizen zum Chiffre-Zyklus’, 343. 58. Wolfgang Rihm (in conversation with Dieter Rexroth), Wolfgang Rihm: Moment-Aufnahme: Ein Porträt. DVD, WERGO MV 0803 5 (2005). 59. Rihm, ‘Notizen zum Chiffre-Zyklus’, 344. 60. Rihm, ‘Improvisation über das Fixieren von Freiheit’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 94. 61. Rihm, ‘Klangbeschreibung – Drei Stücke’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 359. 62. Derivations from –et nunc II, and the idea of ‘Übermalung’, are discussed in an informative article by Ulrich Mosch, ‘“ . . . das Dröhnen der Bild- und Farbflächen . . . ” Zum Verhältnis von Wolfgang Rihm und Kurt Kocherscheidt’, in Brustrauschen: Zum Werkdialog von Kurt Kocherscheidt und Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Heinz Liesbrock (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 70–87. 63. The various insertions are listed in Brügge, ‘Wolfgang Rihm, Vers une symphonie fleuve I–V (1995–2000). Fragen zu formalen, gattungsspezifischen und ästhetischen Aspekten’, in Musik-Konzepte Sonderband: Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2004), 109–27. 64. This tempo indication is perhaps a humorous rejoinder to the marking Luciano Berio uses in the Mahler movement of his Sinfonia: ‘In ruhig fliessender Bewegung’. 65. Rihm, ‘Mitteilungen zu Vers une symphonie fleuve’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 402–3. 66. Rihm, ‘Vers une symphonie fleuve IV’, trans. Robert Lindell, in Programme for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2000), 31. 67. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, 72. 68. Rihm, ‘Vers une symphonie fleuve IV’, 31. 69. Rihm, ‘Mitteilungen zu Vers une symphonie fleuve’, 403. Reinhold Brinkmann, Musik Nachdenken: Reinhold Brinkmann und Wolfgang Rihm im Gespräch (Regensburg: ConBrio, 2001), 29. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Vers une musique

Notes to pages 160–70

70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

255

informelle’, in Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 269–322. Rihm, ‘Gejagte Form für Orchester’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 403–4. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Verborgene Formen’, trans. Christina Preiner, in booklet notes to Wolfgang Rihm, Gejagte Form, Verborgene Formen, Chiffre I, Silence to be Beaten. CD, Kairos 0012072 (2000), 16. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Wolfgang Rihm in Conversation with Joseph Häusler’, trans. Stewart Spencer, in booklet notes to Wolfgang Rihm, Jagden und Formen. CD, DGG 471 558–2 (2002), 11. Rihm, ‘Wolfgang Rihm in Conversation with Joseph Häusler’, 12, 11. For more on sources for Büchner’s novella, see Richard Stokes, ‘The Possibility of Being’, in Programme for English National Opera, London: Jakob Lenz (2012), 23–5. For more on recent responses to the writer Jakob Lenz, see Dörte Schmidt, Lenz im zeitgenössischen Musiktheater (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1993). Rihm, ‘Chiffren von Verstörung. Anmerkungen zu Jakob Lenz’, 314. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), 2. It is equally possible that Rihm knew George Moorse’s film version of Lenz (1970). Hanns-Werner Heister, ‘Sackgasse oder Ausweg aus dem Elfenbeinturm? Zur musikalischen Sprache in Wolfgang Rihms Jakob Lenz’, in Zur ‘Neuen Einfachheit’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981), 106–25. Rihm, ‘Notizen zur Tutuguri-Musik’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 326. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 158–9. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 232–50. Seth Brodsky, ‘Write the Moment: Two Ways of Dealing with Wolfgang Rihm I’, Musical Times 145/1888 (2004), 69. Artaud, Antonin, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, trans. Helen Weaver, in Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 558. Rihm, ‘Mexiko, Eroberungsnotiz’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 387. For more on Müller and Artaud, see Marc von Henning, ‘Introduction: Müller Material’, in Heiner Müller, Theatremachine, ed. Marc von Henning (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), xii. In Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht (1980), the principal personae each appear as a mime artist, a singer and an onstage instrumentalist. Heiner Müller, The Hamletmachine, trans. Marc von Henning, in Heiner Müller, Theatremachine, 86. Rihm, ‘Ganggarten, Hamletmaschine, Brief an P.O.’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 350–1. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Avenues of Approach, Hamlet Machine: Letter to

256

Notes to pages 171–9

89.

90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103. 104.

Peter Oswald’, trans. John Patrick Thomas, in booklet notes to Rihm, Die Hamletmaschine. 2 CDs, Wergo 6195–2 (1991), 12. For more on the topic of doubles in Rihm, see Martin Zenck, ‘Die ästhetische Productivkraft des Fantastischen und des Wahnsinns im Werk Wolfgang Rihms’, in Ausdruck, Zugriff, Differenzen: Der Komponist Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Wolfgang Hofer (Mainz: Schott, 2003), 57–82. Müller, The Hamletmachine, 94. For a more extensive discussion of Die Eroberung von Mexico, see Alastair Williams, ‘Voices of the Other: Wolfgang Rihm’s Music Drama Die Eroberung von Mexico’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129/2 (2004), 240–71. The sources are reproduced, in German translation, in Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1991), [1]–[5]. Rihm, ‘Mexiko, Eroberungsnotiz’, 390. Rihm, ‘Mexiko, Eroberungsnotiz’, 391. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Mexico, a Note on its Conquest’, trans. Susan Marie Praeder, in booklet notes to Rihm: Die Eroberung von Mexico. 2 CDs cpo 999 185–2 (1999), without page numbers. Rihm, ‘Mexiko, Eroberungsnotiz’, 388. Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 179–89. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). This book appears in the bibliography included in the score of Die Eroberung. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 97. Wolfgang Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1991), 1. In keeping with the composer’s view of Montezuma, I refer to him with the male pronoun, while accepting that use of the female pronoun would also be justified. The sketches include a copy of the German translation of Artaud’s text, in which Rihm has underlined the head-as-music passage, and encircled the word ‘träumen’. It appears, then, that Rihm has responded more to words and ideas than to a sequence of events. Wolfgang Rihm Collection, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel. Rihm told Zech that he consulted Ernst Kurth’s Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts. Einführung in Stil und Technik von Bachs melodisher Polyphonie (Bern, 1917). Christina Zech, Zum Geschlechterbild im zeitgenössischen Musiktheater am Beispiel von Adriana Hölszkys Bremer Freiheit und Wolfgang Rihms Die Eroberung von Mexico, Europäische Hochschulschriften 36/183 (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), 163, n. 61. The scenes involving reference to traditional techniques are the most extensively sketched, particularly the ‘Verwüstung’ chorale. Zech, Zum Geschlechterbild, 163–8. This diagram is on the back of a picture postcard entitled ‘Donaueschingen: Donauquelle & Schloss’. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 3.

Notes to pages 180–6

257

105. Margaret Miner, ‘Music and Theatre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, ed. Rosemary Lloyd (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 149. 106. Ulrich Mosch, ‘Autonome Musikdramaturgie: Über Wolfgang Rihms Séraphin-Projekt’, in Musiktheater heute: Internationales Symposion der Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel 2001, ed. Hermann Danuser (Mainz: Schott, 2003), 223. 107. Rihm, ‘Vorspiel auf dem Theaterzettel’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 401. 108. Antonin Artaud, ‘Seraphin’s Theatre’, in The Theatre and its Double, trans. Victor Corti (London: Calder, 1970), 100. 109. The introductory chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is devoted to the idea of the rhizome as a way of understanding proliferation through offshoots. 110. Mosch, ‘Autonome Musikdramaturgie’, 215. 111. Rihm, ‘Musik als Ge-Schichte iher zukünftigen Spur’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 407. For an expanded version of this essay, see Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Étude d’après Séraphin’, trans. Laurie Schwartz, in booklet notes to Rihm, Étude d’après Séraphin. CD Wergo 282 055–2 (1998), 20–3. 112. Rihm, ‘Die Klassifizierung der “Neue Einfachheit” aus der Sicht des Komponisten’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 357–60. 113. Rihm, ‘Postmodern? Postmoderne?’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 396. 114. Hermann Danuser, ‘Postmodernes Musikdenken – Lösung oder Flucht?’, in Neue Musik im politischen Wandel, ed. Hermann Danuser (Mainz: Schott, 1991), 63. 115. Rihm, ‘Laudatio auf Karlheinz Stockhausen’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 323–9; Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Grinding away at the Familiar’, trans. Wieland Hoban, Contemporary Music Review 23/3–4 (2004), 21–9. Stockhausen won the Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis in 1986, as did Lachenmann in 1997. 116. Rihm, ‘Moderne als Klassizismus’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 426–9. 117. Rihm, ‘Über Dis-Kontur’, 293. 118. Rihm, ‘Der geschockte Komponist’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 50–1. 119. Rihm, ‘Erscheinung, Skizze über Schubert’, 311. 120. Rihm, ‘Über Dis-Kontur’, 293. 121. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 23. 122. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 23. 123. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 26. 124. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 35. 125. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 31. 126. Pierre Boulez, ‘Timbre and Composition – Timbre and Language’, trans. R. Robertson, Contemporary Music Review 2/1 (1987), 166–7. 127. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 38. For discussion of open form and its legacy in Boulez, see Edward Campbell, Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 193–209. 128. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 34. 129. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 34. 130. Rihm, ‘Ins eigene Fleisch . . . ’, 119.

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Notes to pages 186–94

131. Rihm, ‘Tonalität. Klischee – Umwertung – Versuch’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 1, 204–5. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’, trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 146. 132. Rihm, ‘Im Innersten’, 304–5. 133. Rihm refers to almost daily conversations with Peter Sloterdijk. ‘Kunst entsteht aus Zweifel: Gespräch mit Bas van Putten (1995)’, in Ausgesprochen, vol. 2, 244. 134. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’. 135. Rihm, ‘Dis-Kontur für großes Orchester’, 289. 136. Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 26. 137. Rihm, ‘Musikalische Freiheit’, 29.

5 Contemporaries of Lachenmann and Rihm: the younger generation 1. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, trans. Richard Toop, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 48. 2. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Über Nicolaus A. Huber’, in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung, 2nd edn, ed. Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2004), 285. 3. Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘Critical Composition’, trans. Petra Music and Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 565. 4. For more on this inaugural competition, see Iddon, ‘Trying to Speak’, 257–8. 5. Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘Harakiri – der Text’, in Durchleuchtungen: Texte zur Musik 1964–1999, ed. Josef Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000), 400. 6. The whole exchange is reproduced in Huber, Durchleuchtungen, as ‘Auseinandersetzung um Harakiri’, 387–401. 7. See Huber, ‘Auseinandersetzung um Harakiri’, 388. 8. This point is made in a discussion of the dispute by Beate Kutschke, ‘Aesthetic Theories and Revolutionary Practice: Nicolaus A. Huber and Clytus Gottwald in Dissent’, in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78–96. 9. Nicolaus A. Huber, ‘On Conceptional Rhythm Composition’, trans. Petra Music and Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 569. 10. Huber, ‘Demijour für Oboe, Violoncello und Klavier’, in Durchleuchtungen, 363. 11. Huber, ‘An Hölderlins Umnachtung für Ensemble’, in Durchleuchtungen, 374–5. Translations from this article, which include text from the score, have drawn freely on those found in Cornelius Schwehr, ‘Nicolaus A. Huber: An Hölderlins Umnachtung’, trans. Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 643–53. This article also influenced my reading of the score. 12. Nicolaus A. Huber, An Hölderlins Umnachtung (Wiesbaden: Breifkopf & Härtel, 1993), 27–8. 13. Huber, ‘An Hölderlins Umnachtung für Ensemble’, Durchleuchtungen, 374.

Notes to pages 194–201

259

14. Huber, ‘Vom körperlichen Grund in Bed and Brackets’, in Durchleuchtungen, 286. 15. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester University Press, 1984). 16. Hannes Seidl, ‘The Height of the Breadth: Pop Culture Infiltrations in the Music of Nicolaus A. Huber’, trans. Philipp Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 662. This article provides a more detailed discussion of Rose Selavy, which owes its title to Marcel Duchamp. 17. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 48. 18. Mathias Spahlinger, ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’, trans. Phillip Blume, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 591. 19. This discussion is indebted to the following article: Philipp Blume, ‘Mathias Spahlinger’s 128 erfüllte augenblicke and the Parameters of Listening’, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 625–42. 20. Mathias Spahlinger, furioso für Ensemble (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1992). 21. Mathias Spahlinger, ‘furioso’, in booklet notes to Mathias Spahlinger, furioso, gegen unendlich, fugitive beauté and Apo do. CD, KAIROS, 0012692KAI (2007), 15. 22. In German, the title is ‘dies ist die zeit der konzeptiven ideologen nicht mehr’. 23. Spahlinger, ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’, 579. 24. Spahlinger, ‘this is the time of conceptive ideologues no longer’, 580, 581, 585. 25. Quoted in Ross Feller, ‘E-sketches: Brian Ferneyhough’s use of Computer-Assisted Compositional Tools’, in A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches, ed. Patricia Hall and Friedemann Sallis (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 177. 26. For more on Ferneyhough’s use of Random Funnels, see Feller, ‘E-sketches’, 179–81. 27. Brian Ferneyhough, ‘Second String Quartet’, in Brian Ferneyhough, Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 119–20. 28. Ferneyhough discusses writing solo pieces in the following: Lois Fitch and John Hails, ‘Failed Time, Successful Time, Shadowtime: An Interview with Brian Ferneyhough’, in Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Max Paddison and Irène Deliège (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 321–2. 29. Ferneyhough, ‘Form – Figure – Style: An Intermediate Assessment’, in Collected Writings, 26. 30. Ferneyhough, ‘Interview with Paul Griffiths’, in Collected Writings, 246. 31. Ferneyhough, ‘Kurze Schatten II for solo guitar’, in Collected Writings, 139. 32. Quoted in Fabrice Fitch, ‘Shadowtime: A Note on the Opera’, in booklet notes to Brian Ferneyhough, Shadowtime. CD, NMC D123 (2006), 7. 33. Ferneyhough, ‘Interview with Jean-Baptiste Barrière’, in Collected Writings, 415. For more on Ferneyhough and Benjamin, see Christoph Knöpfel, Brian Ferneyhough: Compositional Technique as Critical Expressivity, unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College, London (2011). For more on Ferneyhough and Deleuze, see Lois Fitch, ‘Brian Ferneyhough, Postmodern Modernist’, in The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 159–75.

260

Notes to pages 201–10

34. Ferneyhough, ‘Carceri d’invenzione’, in Collected Writings, 132. 35. Ferneyhough, ‘Interview with Richard Toop’, in Collected Writings, 251. 36. Ferneyhough, ‘Carceri d’invenzione: In Conversation with Richard Toop’, in Collected Writings, 299. 37. Richard Toop, ‘Prima le parole: On the Sketches for Ferneyhough’s Carceri d’invenzione I–III’, Perspectives of New Music 32/1 (1994), 154–75. 38. Ferneyhough, ‘Form – Figure – Style’, 21. 39. Ferneyhough, ‘Form – Figure – Style’, 23–4. 40. Ferneyhough, ‘Interview with Richard Toop’, 284. 41. Lachenmann, ‘On Structuralism’, 93. 42. Ferneyhough, ‘Form – Figure – Style’, 25–6. 43. Ferneyhough, ‘Il tempo della figura’, in Collected Writings, 41. 44. Ferneyhough, ‘Parallel Universes’, in Collected Writings, 83. 45. Aribert Reimann, ‘Salut für die junge Avantgarde’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140/1 (1979), 25. 46. Reimann, ‘Salut für die junge Avantgarde’, 25. 47. Ulrich Dibelius, ‘Positions – Reactions – Confusions: The Second Wave of German Music after 1945’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 18. 48. Hans-Jürgen von Bose, ‘Suche nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 17 (1978), 38. 49. The first of Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11 offers a well-known precedent for using a minor third and semitone as the basic unit, expressed in chords and lines, though it does so in such a way that the tonal context is more implied than actual. 50. Von Bose, ‘Suche nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’, 37–8. 51. Von Bose, ‘Suche nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’, 35. 52. Von Bose, ‘Suche nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’, 39. 53. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘The Beautiful in Music Today’, Tempo 135 (1980), 22. 54. Wolfgang von Schweinitz, ‘Points of View’, trans. Harriett Watts, Tempo 132 (March 1980), 12. This article is also from Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140/1 (1979), 19–21. 55. Hans-Christian von Dadelson, ‘Was macht Dionysos im Matriarchat?’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140/1 (1979), 13. 56. Wolfgang von Schweinitz, ‘Mass: for Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra, Op 21’, trans. Gerry Bramall, in booklet notes to Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Messe. CD, Wergo 60 504–50 (1988), 23. 57. Manfred Trojahn, ‘Formbegriff und Zeitgestalt in der “Neuen Einfachheit”. Versuch einer Polemik’, in Zur ‘Neuen Einfachheit’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1981), 85. 58. Manfred Trojahn, untitled, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140/1 (1979), 18. 59. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Vom Einfachen, von Schönen und vom einfach Schönen’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 17 (1978), 22. 60. Dahlhaus, ‘Vom Einfachen’, 30.

Notes to pages 210–16

261

61. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘A Rejection of Material Thinking?’, in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 275. 62. Dahlhaus, ‘A Rejection of Material Thinking?’, 277. 63. Dahlhaus, ‘A Rejection of Material Thinking?’, 279. 64. See the photographs in Dieter Rexroth (ed.), Der Komponist Wolfgang Rihm (Mainz: Schott, 1985), 161. 65. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, trans. Seyla Benhabib, in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 10. 66. Habermas, ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project’, 14. 67. For an informative account of the German postmodernist dialogue in relation to music, see Joakim Tillman, ‘Postmodernism and Art Music in the German Debate’, in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75–91. 68. Hermann Danuser, Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1984), 404. 69. Hermann Danuser, ‘Postmodernes Musikdenken – Lösung oder Flucht?’, in Neue Musik im politischen Wandel, ed. Hermann Danuser (Mainz: Schott, 1991), 63. 70. Helga de la Motte-Haber, ‘Postmodernism in Music: Retrospection as Reassessment’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 80. 71. De la Motte-Haber, ‘Postmodernism in Music’, 80–1. 72. For discussion of pluralism in Rochberg’s Third Quartet, see Mark Berry, ‘Music, Postmodernism, and George Rochberg’s Third String Quartet’, in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, 238–9. 73. Arnold Whittall, ‘All Contradictions Reconciled? Perspectives on York Höller’, Musical Times 139/1864 (1998), 11. 74. York Höller, ‘Composition of the Gestalt, or the Making of the Organism’, trans. Nigel Osborne, Contemporary Music Review 1/1 (1984), 35. 75. Quoted in Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 239. 76. Quoted in Beal, New Music, New Allies, 241. 77. Quoted in Gisela Gronemeyer, ‘Walter Zimmermann’, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in booklet notes to Deutscher Musikrat: Zeitgenössische Musik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, vol. 8 (1970–1980). LP, Harmonia Mundi IC 0761 (1983), 34. 78. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1994), 34. 79. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 51 80. Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, 48. 81. For more on this background, see Frank Schneider, ‘New Music from the Old DDR’, Contemporary Music Review 12/1 (1995), 25–9.

262

Notes to pages 217–24

82. Ulrich Dibelius, Moderne Musik II, 1965–1985 (Munich: Piper, 1988), 280–1. 83. Frank Schneider, ‘Neubau mit Einsturzgefahr: Analytische Reflexionen zur Sinfonie 3 von Friedrich Goldmann’, Melos 50/2 (1988); this article includes an interview with Goldmann, 25–8. 84. Schneider, ‘New Music from the Old DDR’, 37. 85. Frank Schneider, ‘Angemessene Reaktionen: Friedrich Goldmanns Ensemblekonzert 2’, MusikTexte 23 (1988), 11. 86. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Die Humanität der Musik (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2007). 87. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, in booklet to Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Pegasos, Kammerkonzert. CD, Wergo 6547–2 (2000), 11. 88. Mahnkopf, ‘Thesen zur zweiten Moderne’, in Die Humanität der Musik, 160–9. 89. Elsewhere, the philosopher Albrecht Wellmer envisages the emerging ‘Gestalt’ of a second – postmetaphysical – modernity in much grander terms: as heir to the Enlightenment, it would be ‘a modernity without the dream of ultimate reconciliations, but it would still preserve the rational, subversive and experimental spirit of modern democracy, modern art, modern science and modern individualism’. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), viii. 90. Mahnkopf, ‘Thesen zur zweiten Moderne’, 165. 91. Mahnkopf, ‘Thesen zur zweiten Moderne’, 167; Mahnkopf, ‘Der Strukturbegriff der musikalischen Dekonstruktion’, in Die Humanität der Musik, 135. 92. Quoted in Brian Kane, ‘Aspect and Ascription in the Music of Mathias Spahlinger’, Contemporary Music Review 27/6 (2008), 601. 93. For a hearing of Spahlinger’s éphémère that differs from Mahnkopf’s account of the piece, see Kane, ‘Aspect and Ascription’, 595–609. 94. Mahnkopf, programme note to Kammerzyklus, http://www.claussteffenmahn kopf.de. 95. Christian Thorau, ‘Polyphony of Temporal Levels: The Music of Isabel Mundry’, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, in booklet notes to Isabel Mundry, Le Silence – Tysnaden, no one, Spiegel Bilder, Le Voyage. CD, Wergo 6542–2 (1999), 20. 96. Jörn Peter Hiekel, ‘On Isabel Mundry’, http://www.breitkopf.com 97. Rebecca Saunders, ‘Pulling-Threads-of Sound: Rebecca Saunders Interviewed’, previously available on the website for the 2010 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. 98. Saunders, ‘Pulling-Threads-of Sound’, 3. 99. Quoted in Robert Adlington, ‘Into the Sensuous World: The Music of Rebecca Saunders’, Musical Times 140/1868 (1999), 56. 100. Rebecca Saunders, ‘Cinnabar’, in Programme for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2010), 53.

Notes to pages 225–35

263

101. For a discussion of Pintscher’s music until 1998, see Michael Töpel, ‘Confidence in the Power of the Poetic: The Composer Matthias Pintscher’, Tempo 205 (1998), 12–14. 102. Matthias Pintscher, ‘Notiz zu Janusgesicht’, Janusgesicht für Viola und Violoncello (Kassell: Bärenreiter, 2001). 103. Matthias Pintscher, quoted in Töpel, ‘Confidence in the Power of the Poetic’, 14. See also Michael Töpel, ‘Matthias Pintscher’s Thomas Chatterton’, Tempo 207 (1998), 34, 36. 104. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, ‘Der “eigene” Ton, ein unwillkülicher Fortschrittsmotor? Abschließende Podiumsdiskussion mit den Referentinnen und Matthias Pintscher’, in Was noch kommt . . . Der Komponist Matthias Pintscher, ed. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich (Mainz: Schott, 2004), 81–9.

Epilogue 1. Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Composing in the Shadow of Darmstadt’, trans. Richard Toop, Contemporary Music Review 23/3 (2004), 52. 2. Wolfgang Rihm, ‘Grinding Away at the Familiar’, trans. Wieland Hoban, Contemporary Music Review 23/3–4 (2004), 25. 3. Rihm, ‘Grinding Away at the Familiar’, 28. 4. See Dieter Rexroth (ed.), Der Komponist Wolfgang Rihm (Mainz: Schott, 1985), 161. 5. For a discussion of ‘reinvigorated modernism’, see Arnold Whitall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music: Tradition and Innovation (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204–7. 6. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), vii, 89. 7. David Metzer also argues for continuity across historically detached modernist styles, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–29. 8. For discussion of the multiple strands in a late work by Ligeti, see Whittall, Exploring Twentieth-Century Music, 204–7.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor 9, 10, 14, 56, 73, 89, 93, 97, 117, 122, 123, 129, 159, 186 American experimentalists 21 Andersen, Hans Christian 108 Andraschke, Peter 69 Arditti Quartet 14, 23 Artaud, Antonin 7, 168, 174, 177, 179, 180 Auden, W. H. 63 Bach, Johann Sebastian 49, 80, 96, 97, 165 Bachmann, Ingeborg 63 Bacon, Francis 201 Barthes, Roland 6, 45, 122, 175 Baudelaire, Charles 180 Baudrillard, Jean 6, 194 Beal, Amy 17, 21 Beatles, the 51, 66 Becker, Wolfgang 214 Beethoven, Ludwig van 33, 56, 105, 106, 130, 131, 137 bicentenary 55, 67 late style 56 Benjamin, Walter 35, 117, 121, 200 Berg, Alban 49, 126, 130, 164 Berio, Luciano 44, 52, 85 Berlin 4, 5, 21 Bernstein, Leonard 105 Beuys, Joseph 37 Bonn 4 Borio, Gianmario 8, 14 Bose, Hans-Jürgen von 13, 14, 87, 131, 208, 209 Streichtrio 207–8 Boulez, Pierre 8, 19, 57, 124, 159, 185 bourgeois music 44, 45, 81 Bowie, Andrew 187 Brahms, Johannes 60 Brecht, Berthold 130 Bredemeyer, Reiner 3 Bagatellen für B. 55–7 East Germany 57 Brinkmann, Reinhold 12, 131 Brodsky, Seth 169 Brown, Earle 10 Bruckner, Anton 218 Brügge, Joachim 130, 132 Brunner, Eduard 90 Büchner, Georg 49, 164, 197 Bürger, Peter 122 Burghardt, Ursula 37

[277]

Cacciari, Massimo 33, 34 Cage, John 14, 16, 17, 21, 31, 44, 85, 185–6 Europera 22–3 Roaratorio 21–2 Cantares mexicanos 174 Caudwell, Christopher 93, 94 Cavallotti, Pietro 99, 107 Chopin, Frédéric 27, 60 Cold War 3, 4, 15 Cologne 19–20, 36, 214 Musik der Zeit 20 Cummings, E. E. 226 Dadelson, Hans-Christian von 29 Dahlhaus, Carl 2, 3, 10, 12, 16, 25 neo-Romanticism 210–11 Danuser, Hermann 8, 16, 33, 183, 212 Darmstadt 26, 57, 67, 75, 81 Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 9, 14 politics 11–13 Daverio, John 139 Debussy, Claude 43 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 7, 123, 166, 168, 201 Derrida, Jacques 6, 7, 45, 220 Dessau, Paul 55, 216 Deutscher Musikrat 3, 16, 25 Deutschlandlied 96 Dibelius, Ulrich 44, 206, 217 Donaueschinger Musiktage 18–19, 125 Downes, Stephen 63 Drott, Eric 13, 28 Dubček, Alexander 51 Dutschke, Rudi 5, 58, 83 East Germany 3, 4, 216–17 Eimert, Herbert 19 Eisler, Hans 216 Ensemble Intercontemporain 23 Ensemble Modern 23–4 Ensemble Recherche 24 Ensslin, Gudrun 108, 110, 114–15 expressionism 49 Feldman, Morton 14, 21 Ferneyhough, Brian 3, 6, 13, 14, 16, 23, 119, 120, 219, 231 Carceri d’invenzione cycle 201–3 German music 204 neo-Romanticism 200, 203 subjectivity 204–5

278

Index Fichte, Hubert 159 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich 58, 122 Flaubert, Gustave 133 form in new music 8–10 Fox, Christopher 14 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 14 Friedrich, Caspar David 7 Frisius, Rudolf 69 Frobenius, Wolf 127 Fröhling, Michael 164 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 106 Globokar, Vinko 67 Goebbels, Heiner 3 Goethe, Johann 39, 40, 41 Goldmann, Friedrich 3 Ensemblekonzert 217–19 Gontard, Susan 33 Gottwald, Clytus 191–2 Grisey, Gérard 14, 120 spectralism 13–14 Guattari, Félix 7, 123, 166, 168 Guevara, Che 58 Günderrode, Karoline von 143 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 8, 219, 230, 231 postmodernism 211 Handel, Frederick 171 Häusler, Josef 19, 126 Hegel, G. W. F. 197 heightened perception 36, 235 Heile, Björn 20, 37, 42, 43, 77 Heine, Heinrich 39, 57 Heinrich Strobel Foundation 31 Heister, Hans Werner 168 Helm, Everett 8 Henze, Hanns-Werner 2, 3, 5, 21, 120, 225 Das Floss der Medusa 58–9 in relation to Lachenmann 63–4 politics 58–9 tradition 59 Tristan 60–3 Herbeck, Ernst 140 hermeneutics 233 Herzog, Werner 7 Hiekel, Jörn Peter 54 hippies 66 historical performance 92 Hitler, Adolf 37 Hölderlin, Friedrich 30, 32–3, 35, 39, 54, 63, 139, 193, 194, 198, 233 Höller, York 213, 214 Hölszky, Adriana 213 Hommel, Friedrich 14, 15 Huber, Klaus 125, 126 Huber, Nicolaus A. 2, 6, 7, 12, 13 An Hölderlins Umnachtung 193–4 Demijour 192–3 Harakiri 190–2 Versuch über Sprache 189–90 Huyssen, Andreas 7

inwardness 33, 55 Jameson, Fredric 122, 141 Janáček, Leos 130, 134 Joyce, James 22, 51, 224 Jungheinrich, Hans-Klaus 227 Kafka, Franz 32 Kagel, Mauricio 1, 2, 7, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 45, 48, 57, 68, 76–7, 79, 104, 118, 212, 231, 235 apocryphal 42 Aus Deutschland 39–42 Ludwig van 7, 36–8 Passé composé, KlavieRhapsodie 42–4 Staatstheater 38–9 Kaltenecker, Martin 114 Karajan, Herbert von 37, 92 Kiefer, Anselm 7, 61, 229 Killmayer, Wilhelm 16, 64, 74, 193 described by Rihm, see Rihm, Wolfgang Nachtgedanken 55 Schumann in Endenich 53–4 Knussen, Oliver 63 Kocherscheidt, Kurt 137 Kohl, Jerome 70 Köhler, Armin 19 Kontarsky, Aloys 67 Kramer, Lawrence 41, 61 Kronos Quartet 14 Lacan, Jacques 140 Lachenmann, Helmut 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 26, 31, 52, 67, 68, 74, 189, 195, 203, 216, 220, 225, 227, 228, 234 Accanto 88–93 Air 80–3 Ausklang 103–5 beauty 80, 86–7, 121 bridge clef 78 Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern 108–17 Ein Kinderspiel 100–3 in relation to Henze, see Henze, Hans Werner in relation to Nono 35–6 in relation to Rihm 228–30 Klangstruktur 75, 76 Kontrakadenz 83–6 language-context of music 89 Mouvement ( – vor der Erstarrung) 103 music with images 109–10 musique concrète instrumentale 76–7, 79, 81 neo-Romanticism 118–19 Notturno 77–8 orchestra, the 80 performance practice 92 Pression 79–80 recording industry 92 refusal of habit 77, 83 Reigen seliger Geister 106–7

Index rhythmic net 81, 99, 107 Salut für Caudwell 93–6 serialism 117–18 Staub 105–6 subjectivity 91–2, 123 Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied 96–100 temA 78–9 Lenz, Jakob 49, 164 Leonardo da Vinci 108, 115 Ligeti, György 1, 3, 10, 13, 17, 76, 79, 104, 118, 206, 235 and the 1960s 26 Horn Trio 27–8 Lontano 26–7 neo-Romanticism 29–30 politics 12 relationship to Germany 25 tradition 30–1 Liszt, Franz 43 London Sinfonietta 23 Maconie, Robin 68, 72 Maderna, Bruno 8, 33 madness 54, 193 Mahler, Gustav 59, 126, 129 Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen 6 modernism 220 Marshall Plan 4 Marx, Karl 93, 198 Marxism 6, 67 Mayakovsky, Vladmir 50 Messiaen, Olivier 51 Metzer, David 109 Metzger, Heinz-Klaus 9, 16, 20, 22, 32, 37, 92, 227 minimalism 27, 211 modernism 183, 230, 234 modernity 73, 209, 232 Mosch, Ulrich 14, 180, 181 Motte-Haber, Helga de la 212 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 88, 89, 206 Müller, Heiner 57, 144, 153, 170 Müller, Wilhelm 40 Müller-Siemens, Detlev 207 Mundry, Isabel 222 Spiegel Bilder 222–3 music in Germany 3, 31, 73–4, 235 Musikfabrik 24 Musil, Robert 36 Nancarrow, Conlon 28 National Socialism 4, 5 Navratil, Leo 140 neo-Romanticism 13, 64, 69, 231, see also Dahlhaus, Ferneyhough, Lachenmann new music 2, 189, 198 new simplicity 183, 211, 214 Nielinger-Vakil, Carola 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich 128, 153, 234 Nonnenmann, Rainer 83, 89, 90, 113

279 Nono, Luigi 3, 8, 12, 14, 19, 64, 73, 75, 76, 116, 120, 131, 134, 153, 174, 230, 231 described by Lachenmann, see Lachenmann, Helmut described by Rihm, see Rihm, Wolfgang Fragmente – Stille 32–4 and politics 31–2 Prometeo 34–5 Oberlin, Johann Friedrich 164 Oehlschlägel, Reinhard 11, 23 Ohnesorg, Benno 5, 83 Orff, Carl 52 Osborne, Nigel 223 Paz, Octavio 174, 178 Pintscher, Matthias 2 Janusgesicht 225–6 Thomas Chatterton 227 Piranesi, Giambattista 201 Portal, Michel 66 postmodernism 1, 14, 29, 183, 211–12, 231 post-structuralism 6–7, 187 Prague Spring 4 prosperity 4, 5 protest movements 4, 5, 45, 52, 81 Paris 5 West German student protest movement 5 radio plays 20, 21 radio stations 17–18 education 18 Südwestrundfunk 18 Westdeutscher Rundfunk 19–20, 21 Rainer, Arnulf 155 Red Army Faction 5, 108 Reimann, Aribert 205, 206 Reiz, Edgar 143 reunification 4, 15, 18, 105 Richter, Gerhard 7 Riehn, Rainer 16, 22 Rihm, Wolfgang 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 30, 31, 33, 42, 48, 49, 65, 68, 69, 74, 119, 120, 203, 207, 208, 209, 212, 223, 228, 231 Abgesangsszenen 128–9 Chiffre cycle 149–52 Dionysos 234 Dis-Kontur 126 Die Eroberung von Mexico 173–9 –et nunc 155–6 Fourth Quartet 133–4 Frau/Stimme 153–4 Fremde Szenen 143–8 Gedrängte Form 161 Gejagte Form 160 Gesungene Zeit 154 Die Hamletmaschine 169–71 Hölderlin-Fragmente 139 Im Innersten 129–31

280

Index Rihm, Wolfgang (cont.) in relation to Killmayer 54–5 in relation to Lachenmann 228–30 in relation to Nono 34 in relation to Stockhausen 65 inclusivity 184 Jagden und Formen 161–4 Jakob Lenz 164–8 Klangbeschreibung 152–3 Klavierstück Nr. 6 135–7 Klavierstück Nr. 7 137–8 Musik fur Drei Streicher 131–3 Neue Alexanderlieder 140–2 Séraphin 179–82 Eine Stimme 154 subjectivity 147, 187 Sub-Kontur 126–7 tradition 183–4 Tutuguri 168–9 Übermalung 155 Verborgene Formen 160–1 Vers une symphonie fleuve 156–60 Wölfli-Liederbuch 142–3 Rilke, Rainer Maria 34 Rimbaud, Arthur 128 Rochberg, George 213 rock music 5 Sacher Foundation 15–16 Salter, Richard 140 Saunders, Rebecca 3, 6 Cinnabar 224 Scelsi, Giacinto 14 Schaefer, Solf 15 Schaeffer, Pierre 76 Schäfer, Thomas 15 Scherzinger, Martin 102 schizophrenia 7, 140, 166 Schlegel, Friedrich 139 Schnabel, Ernst 59 Schnebel, Dieter 17, 21, 79, 118 Schubert-Phantasie 46–8 theology 44 visible music 45 Schneider, Frank 17, 217, 218 Schoenberg, Arnold 23, 68, 165 Schöning, Klaus 20, 21 Schubert, Franz 39, 40, 41, 46, 48, 57, 114, 137 Schumann, Robert 16, 30, 39, 53, 54, 57, 143–4, 166, 192, 232–3 Schweinitz, Wolfgang von 13, 131, 206–7, 209 Seidl, Hannes 195 serialism 6, 75, 77, 78, 230 Siemens Foundation 15 Sloterdijk, Peter 187 socialist realism 4, 25

Spahlinger, Mathias 221 128 erfüllte augenblicke 196–7 furioso 197 Kammerkonzert 221 language-character of music 198 Springer, Axel 5 Steinecke, Wolfgang 8 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 1, 8, 10, 15, 19, 20, 31, 45, 52, 53, 57, 65, 75, 76, 79, 81, 118, 125, 127, 135, 185 Aus den sieben Tagen 66–7 described by Rihm, see Rihm, Wolfgang formula composition 68, 69, 70 intuitive music 66 late style 73 Licht 69–73 Mantra 68 Stravinsky, Igor 58, 169 Strobel, Heinrich 18 structuralism 6 subjectivity 6, 73, 232, see also Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, Rihm Tadday, Ulrich 16 Taruskin, Richard 26 Tel Quel 6 Thomas, Ernst 8, 11, 12, 14, 21 Thomas, Nick 5 Todorov, Tzvetan 175, 179 Tomek, Otto 19 Toop, Richard 67, 76, 85, 203 tradition 7–8, 22, 46, 53, see also Rihm Trojahn, Manfred 209, 225 Varèse, Edgard 149, 152 Velte, Eugen Werner 125 Vietnam War 5, 65 Wagner, Richard 59, 60 Webern, Anton 8, 57 Wellmer, Albrecht 123, 231 West Germany 3, 4, 5 Whittall, Arnold 30, 63, 68, 213 Widmann, Jörg 232 Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 20 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 51 Wölfli, Adolf 142 Young, La Monte 66 Zimmermann, Bernd Alois 19, 68, 85, 164 collage 49–50 Requiem für einen jungen Dichter 50–2 Zimmermann, Walter 20 American music 214 Ländler Topographien 215–16