Portrait of Helmut Lachenmann
on his 90th birthday
The motto of the workshop concerts – "Happy New Ears" – is borrowed from a New Year's wish from John Cage. Cage, along with Luigi Nono, whose student he was, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, is one of the important influences that shaped Helmut Lachenmann. On November 27, he turns 90; an occasion to honor one of the most important composers of the 20th and 21st centuries with a portrait concert. For almost 70 years, with his sophisticated sound world and his consistently socially challenging concept of art, he has stood for broadening horizons on many levels. "Art is not an expression of what shapes the times, but of what it lacks," says Lachenmann. And, with reference to Beethoven, he formulates: "The refraction of magical, familiar experience through the spiritually charged, creative will." This also describes what he is concerned with.
Since his beginnings, Lachenmann has developed an alternative world of sound. He explored how sound emerges from noise. In doing so, he follows the principle that every acoustic event can be shaped into music. Inspired by the "musique concrète" that emerged in the 1950s, which used electronic means to capture everyday sounds and transform them into music, he developed what he called "musique concrète instrumentale." Lachenmann does not work with electronic means, but rather with the classical instruments of Western music, occasionally supplementing them with instruments from other cultures. This has resulted in an expansion of playing techniques, especially for wind instruments and strings, but also percussion, for which Lachenmann has developed his own notation that has now become a kind of canon. His opera Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (1997), which was also performed at the Frankfurt Opera in 2015, can be considered an epoch-making work.
The composition Mouvement (- before the rigidity) was commissioned by the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1983/84 and performed by the Ensemble Modern almost simultaneously with its premiere. In a commentary on the work, the composer wrote: "A music of dead movements, quasi final twitches, whose pseudo-activity ... itself indicates the inner rigidity that precedes the outer one." But the "virtuosity of crossed-out virtuosity," as Lachenmann's friend and fellow composer Wolfgang Rihm called it, seemed almost to undo the critical impulse. Lachenmann: "With all due respect, I felt this piece, of all pieces, to be a relapse into the all too familiar musical style and actually wanted to withdraw it." The Ensemble Modern's interpretation prevented this. In the meantime, it has been performed over a hundred times worldwide. Reason enough to approach the work again over 40 years later.
Ensemble Modern
Enno Poppe conductor, moderation
Mouvement – vor der Erstarrung (1983/84) - Helmut Lachenmann