Sounds Like This

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In spite of wet weather, a large and enthusiastically youthful audience gathered at Mills College’s Lisser Hall on Saturday to hear the music of Helmut Lachenmann, an admired German avant-gardist, and currently the school’s composer in residence. Born in 1935, he studied with Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the late 1950s, attracted by the experimentalism of the times, which has deeply influenced his own work.

Helmut Lachenmann

It was the final piece on the program, Allegro Sostenuto (1986-88), that made the strongest, most vivid impression, in a dynamic, exhilarating performance by pianist Christopher Jones, clarinetist Matt Ingalls, and cellist Geoffrey Gartner. A collection of brief musical fragments energizes this score, including single, accented notes, often repeated, passing freely among the instruments, and tending to coalesce at climactic points with a flurry of rapid scales and vibrant piano sonorities. After each of these increasingly intense episodes the music trails off quietly into more reposeful sections, until momentum gradually returns.

Lachenmann’s reliance on extended performance techniques is ever-present, especially in his string and woodwind writing. Harsh, scraping sounds, as well as tapping the bow in all manner of places on the cello, afford a constant and unpredictable array of changing effects, often in extreme registers. Harmonics, squeaks, occasional forays into the piano strings, and excessively breathy tones on the clarinet and bass clarinet add their own colors to the mix. The piano, though, is relatively free of most distortions. Instead, it acts as the driving force behind much of the music, providing the resonance and harmonic density needed to offset the coloristic, fluctuating input of the other two instruments.

Two shorter, more modest works were also on the program, both for piano, played by the composer. The early Wiegenmusik (1963) combines the use of prolonged resonance with a lively interplay of chords and arpeggios. The seven brief pieces from Child’s Play (1980) take a different tack. Each piece is based on a simple rhythmic or textural effect that a child might discover at the piano, like an interesting cluster of notes, a combination of sounds from the high and low ends of the keyboard, or a bouncy, obsessive rhythm. This material is played over and over, with only slight modifications, as if to finally exhaust its effect through much repetition.

Sounds of Silence

In Gran Torso (1972, 1978), for string quartet, Lachenmann seems intrigued by the interaction between sound and silence. He begins tentatively, invading the silence with a few gentle noises before introducing recognizable pitches. As the music becomes more sustained, various hisses, grunts, scrapes, and twitterings begin to evoke the sound and textures of electronic music, an ongoing influence in several pieces on Saturday’s program. At one point in Gran Torso the instruments start to bow thin air, as if silence has temporarily taken over, only to be gradually displaced by the return of sound.

Toccatina (1986) is a brief composition for solo violin, played here with finesse by Graeme Jennings. A bit of absurdist humor and preciosity creeps in when, after gently poking away at his instrument for a while, Jennings wryly stops to measure his bow against the violin’s tailpiece before resuming from where he had left off. This bit of gratuitous levity discloses a tongue-in-cheek quality in Lachenmann’s musical personality that may be left for future concerts to explore further.

Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who lives in the East Bay.

Comments

I wish I could agree with you, but the concert was a big big disappointment for me. I was hoping to hear some recent music by this composer, a name I’ve been familiar with for over 30 years. But no, all the music played was from 20 to 45 years ago. Nothing new here.

One of the criticisms of Lachenmann’s work is that he hasn’t gone past the 1980’s. Apparently so.

The style of cataloging bizarre things you can do with acoustic instruments was the rage in the 70’s and 80’s. When you run out of ideas just drag the bow below the bridge for no reason.

And, I failed to see any tongue-in-cheekiness in any of it. In fact, this was no laughing matter. It was all very sad.

Posted by Richard Friedman on January 30, 2008 at 8:08 pm
(Mostly To Richard Friedman:)

On the contrary, Lachenmann has been constantly developing his own way of MAKING music with “extended” instrumental sounds, combining a modern, “acousmatic” compositional approach with “classical” techniques. Indeed, a good example is “Allegro Sostenuto” — it is almost Beethoven-like in that the entire composition is spun out of the handful of motives introduced in the first few bars of the piece, with timbre being an extra dimension in which these motives can mutate.

Lachenmann (now 72), is definitely not an emerging young composer. But the fact that the audience *was* young and enthusiastic is a telling sign. Just like young european composers championed Webern and Messiaen in the 50’s and the Bang-on-a-Can crowd latched onto Andriessen and Reich, it really seems to me that a significant sector of today’s young composers are finding their own heros of “extended instrumental” composition in the likes of Lachenmann, Sciarrino, Grisey, and others.

I should also point out that Lachenmann only has a handful of chamber works, “Allegro Sostenuto” and his string quartets being the most substantial, and most practical to perform! Apart from a couple sfSound concerts, this was the first time the Bay Area was even able to hear Lachenmann’s music live.

Posted by Matt Ingalls on February 1, 2008 at 12:53 pm