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Toward a New Aesthetic Quality. OnHelmut Lachenmann's Aesthetics ofMaterial1Peter RuzickaPublished online: 15 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Peter Ruzicka (2004): Toward a New Aesthetic Quality. On HelmutLachenmann's Aesthetics of Material1 , Contemporary Music Review, 23:3-4, 97-102

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Toward a New Aesthetic Quality. OnHelmut Lachenmann’s Aesthetics ofMaterial1

Peter Ruzicka (translated by Wieland Hoban)

This is an article that I wrote 30 years ago, as a 20-something, about the music ofHelmut Lachenmann until 1972. I offer my opinions about his music during that period,

which was quite advanced and misunderstood. Thirty years later, I think that it isinteresting to take this backward glance and see how much—and how little—has reallychanged.

Keywords: Development; Evolution; Listening; Musical Politics

The relationship between music and politics, an unquestionable problem ofcontemporary composition in the 1970s, is primarily the question as to the

instrumental function of precisely this compositional activity: Can music achievesomething, exert an influence on the listener’s psyche, an influence which transpires

as a motivation to action or non-action? Or is the traditional axiom of freedom fromvalues, of music’s self-sufficiency, ultimately exposed merely to the temporary

illusion of a battle that can perhaps be explained according to the modern tendencyto question as many aspects of life as possible as to the conventional patterns of

behaviour and thought underlying them, of politicizing them?A corresponding analysis of the New Music from those very 1970s, in terms of this

aspect of ‘wanting to achieve something’ intended by the composer, shows clearly

that, in the first third of the decade, those efforts increasingly developed which soughtto overcome the conventional aesthetic of apparent beauty: music should no longer

simply represent itself, stand only for itself, but rather set off thought processes, opendialectical reflections to unsettle the consciousness of the recipient, the listener. This

music believes in such a thing as aesthetic progress, a progress that always attains anaccessible proximity at the point of overcoming that stage of reification in which the

aesthetic object inevitably becomes trapped today, when, for lack of any critical sting,it is simply absorbed into the machinery of musical production.

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 97 – 102

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285717

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This development occurs in accordance with the tendencies toward a new

enlightenment which have awakened in our society since the 1960s and which aim fora form of human consciousness capable of providing a counterweight to the

normative influence of industrially controlled consumerist thinking; tendencieswhose humanitarian concern frequently takes the side of the oppressed, the

disenfranchised and the suffering. The central difficulty for composition today is toavoid a mere outward documentation of these tendencies with the intention alreadyexpressed and, rather, put them into practice—that is, allow them to take effect in the

communicative layers of the work of art. Here, one finds a very far-reaching schism interms of thinking and aesthetic approach; the one direction, whose representatives

one could name as Luigi Nono and Hans Werner Henze, lets the political qualityappear merely as a supplementary aspect: accusations, pronouncements, concepts

that are programmatic, imaginary, overt, tacit, or even construed after the fact encasecomparatively traditional musical structures. In some cases, the verbal sources form a

manner of libretto-like running thread, around which, following the execution of arather traditional, at times almost cliched process of realization, musical contexts areformed whose autonomy is condemned from the outset to being of a restricted kind;

in other cases, materials moulded to suit more and less novel forms serve anillustrative purpose. Absolute music in the original sense barely seems conceivable

under such circumstances, unless it abruptly violates its own standard. This innerrestriction seems to constitute an inhibition that almost entirely prevents the music

from gaining a vital distance from itself, a distance that should be insisted upon forthe sake of its autonomy, its freedom. Music and political engagement thus rid each

other of the sting that is so necessary and desirable; they run the risk of neutralizingeach other from the outset and restricting their potential impact. This serious

criticism should not blind us to the integrity and sincerity of even such an approach;even in its ultimate failure—in terms of the original intention—this music retains amore significant element of historical truth than those attempts, still so numerous,

simply to adapt to the system, as with those of Penderecki, whose success ultimatelysprung from a certain misguided aestheticism.

A second movement within the music of the present also goes—albeit usingextremely different methods—in search of a new aesthetic quality, a quality that must

ultimately be addressed as a political one. Here, conflicts are—in contrast to therespective compositional aesthetics of Nono and Henze, for example—grasped and

dealt with as material-immanent conflicts. This aspect deserves to be explained inmore detail. One can consider Helmut Lachenmann the most important and mostconsistent exponent of this approach. Lachenmann, born in Stuttgart in 1935, a

student of Luigi Nono in Venice from 1958 to 1960, already broke with theincreasingly uniform structures of serial music—such as at times became a fetish in

Darmstadt toward the end of the 1950s—quite early on in his work. In particular, herecognized fairly soon that the more or less modernist complexion of serial and post-

serial music could, in time, create a highly superficial pseudo-communication amongwider listening circles, but at the cost of sacrificing the actual, original demands of

98 P. Ruzicka (trans. W. Hoban)

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this music. A mere sound carpet thus simply offered the decor for a relationship that

Lachenmann himself fittingly described as a ‘cross-country contact’, one which ‘refersto all those set pieces and expressive leftovers from tonal listening practice which,

now homeless, tonal thinking now clings to’. This statement points to a centralcategory in Lachenmann’s aesthetics of material, even if it can only be experienced

here precisely in its negation: the category of tonality. Tonality, which is to beovercome at last, is here to be understood in the widest sense; it is the aestheticmiddle, that place of unburdened and unburdening security within a differentiated

tension-field.From this perspective, such examples as the texture-pieces of Ligeti, the expressive

clusters of Penderecki and the seemingly avant-gardist coloristic effects of Henzeultimately transpire as assortments of cliches which are still indebted to tonality to

the utmost degree, even if certain exegetes or the composers themselves believe to seeaspects of aesthetic progress in them. This music’s external potential for success can

be explained through the very same conscious coquetry with tonal listening habits:functional tonality is merely supplanted and continued in a new system of relations,which is for its part tonal.

While a composition such as Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris I offers an example ofa compositional approach that purports to be progressive, yet in fact virtually invites

regression, an affirmation of conventional listening expectations simply awaitingconsummation—Helmut Lachenmann’s Gran Torso, an approximately 25-minute

piece—succeeds in showing to what degree this music has retained an element offreedom through the continuous negation of routine forms and norms of

communication, an element of freedom that obstructs the unnoticed takeover bythe industrial process of commodification. That which is merely exotic or decorative

is eliminated, and the path is now clear for an autonomous treatment of, as it were,the uncovered musical material. It is this method that creates the objectivepreconditions for possible musical messages, to begin with by disabling the

established rules, which in reality prove to be obstacles to genuine communication.Lachenmann realized early on that a counter-tonal manner of composition can

only be possible with musical material lacking any sediments of tonality; it wasnecessary to question precisely this material in order also to have the material

element—freed from any tonal reflexes—at one’s disposal for composition.Lachenmann proceeded in this from a somewhat mechanistic perspective: while

the traditional musical thought of two post-war decades saw innovations in theformal domain as the real aim, the musical material itself was now subjected to aradical critique and ordered from an energetic perspective, as it were, one that

afforded the manner of sound production equal value to the sounding result. The useof traditional playing categories such as arco ordinario on the violin, a tremolo, a

sforzato, a crescendo, even the unimpaired use of the tempered system—these were allstill cliched elements, after all, which could only hold on to their functional meaning

within categories of thought ultimately defined by an overall tonal frame of reference.It was thus the primary concern to eliminate them. The result would necessarily be—

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by conventional standards—a material greatly under attack, but on the other hand a

new sonic substance that had regained its uniqueness through self-negation.Concerning this clearly revolutionary aspect, Lachenmann once wrote:

While musicmaking involves a generally very discrete effort in the production of asound in the desired manner . . . I would like to attempt a reversal of this causalrelationship: allowing the tone to sound in order to create an awareness of theunderlying effort involved, both on the part of the performer and the instrument—that is, something like a deduction of the cause from the effect, which is in facttaken for granted with any everyday sound, and—this particularly appeals to me—is not dependent on how musical or educated one is. In this sense a form ofmusique concrete, with the fundamental difference that such music strives tointegrate everyday sounds into musical listening, whereas I want to profane, to de-musicalise whatever sound I might choose as a direct or indirect result ofmechanical actions and procedures, in order thus to move toward a newunderstanding. Sound as an acoustic record of a highly specific expenditure ofenergy under highly specific conditions.

Where, as in such works as Guero, temA, Pression, or Air, the acoustic event thus

revealed is questioned as to its energetic aspect on the basis of a counter-tonalaesthetic, the music succeeds notably in penetrating the surface of what is taken for

granted. The physical process of musical production, to the extent that it becomesperceptibly and palpably manifest, had previously always been concealed; tradition

had all but frozen the conditions of sound to a taboo, as if the factor of workultimately underlying the actual phenomena needed to be condemned or repressed. It

is precisely with this work and with the resistance that obstructs this work thatLachenmann’s music expresses solidarity, thus correcting the then prevalent tendency

toward a repression of physical effort.Nineteen sixty-nine saw the completion of Air. Musik fur grosses Orchester und

Schlagzeug-Solo. Air is the sonic envelope for acoustic-realistic sound events

assigned to one another in the most differentiated of tension relationships: branchesare broken, membranes are rubbed, strings are squeezed, metal objects are scraped.

The familiar is transformed into the estranged, to something estranged in a newcontext with the goal of releasing what has been concealed: a music that has

absorbed the utopia of genuine emancipation. Lachenmann’s music is thus theresult of an extremely consistent reflection upon its own aesthetic preconditions; it

causes listeners to take a stance, to question their own experiential categorieswithout reservation: it touches on taboos. This is the real boundary—and the onlyconceivable one, it would seem—to a transformation of listening consciousness. For

in the many bourgeois taboos we find sedimented those ideals of beauty that mustunconsciously determine the need to think in frames of reference that stem from a

preserving, protective aesthetic middle. These taboos ultimately transpire as a fatalhindrance to genuine social emancipation. If they are attacked and finally also

destroyed, then music almost paradigmatically fulfills a task that deserves to becalled a political one.

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The contrast to those compositions stemming from the belief that setting

pronouncements and slogans is the only way to lend music political effectiveness isobvious. For, as a rule, they merely offer a constellation in which the critical element

of the text’s accusations and the critical element of the music neutralize each other, orsometimes reduce each other to absurdity, whereas this music touches the nerve of

what truly needs to be addressed: it dares to infiltrate the sheltered safety of thelistener. For the composer, the dialectic of his work lies in the fact that—to beunderstood correctly—he must first counter the expectations and communicative

rules of society in order to formulate his message in the resulting space of newfoundfreedom. Lachenmann speaks in this context of the necessity of clarifying the

difference between ‘understanding and complicity’ as results of this conflict, so tospeak. On this dialectic of a communication initially ‘denied’, he once wrote:

Society, however, which sees itself understood as having been exposed, and for itspart invited to understand, is deprived of its self-protection; it experiences thefreedom of art it once sanctioned in the mirror of its own lack of freedom. In themanner in which it finds its way in the uncertain, unfamiliar aesthetic situationdirectly related to itself, in which it comes to terms with the burden of such aninsecurity, remains clueless, protests, defends itself, flees once more tomisunderstandings or, on the other hand, strives to examine this situation, toquestion it, to analyse it—in this manner it accounts for itself to itself.

Nonetheless, Lachenmann’s aesthetic—though certain of the element of negationwithin itself—insists upon an intact notion of the musical work. His forms and

formations, clear and palpable even at first listening—especially in Kontrakadenz—were meanwhile at risk of distracting from the central issues through their smooth

surface. For this reason, Lachenmann undertook (in various works, such as GranTorso, Klangschatten—mein Saitenspiel and Fassade) a reduction of the structuralrelationships that had still formed such a complex network in Kontrakadenz. As a

result, this consciously intended facade form displays the musical material regainedthrough the process of negation even more freely, more openly; the danger of

distraction through the dictate of an overall context had been eliminated.Helmut Lachenmann’s music has confronted the extreme of what music is able to

achieve today. Listening becomes discovering, relating things to each other,investigating, sounding out, questioning; it becomes self-reflection, and even a

pulling out of the carpet from under one’s feet: a continuous learning process inwhich the author himself, not least, participates as a member of this society.

The accusation that the conceptual edifice of so differentiated an aesthetic

presumes a listener with a comparable level of intellectual insight, that this too isultimately no more than an attempt to preach to those already converted, finds little

confirmation in reality: wherever a systematic miseducation of listening and thelistener have not taken place, the realistic processes of this music and their acoustic

effects should be intelligible at every level in their coherence, their clarity and theircompositional consistency. But the sting of Lachenmann’s music also lies in its

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unreserved unmasking of those aesthetics in its proximity which merely purport to be

progressive. It is not least here that one might see an indication of the historical truththat seems discernible in many of Lachenmann’s works, a historical truth that—

without yet having the objectifying distance of several decades at its disposal—identifies what has been composed at present as valid and lasting.

Note

[1] This article, written in 1974, appears in German in a collection of Ruzicka’s writings (1998),Erfundene und gefundene Musik. Thomas Schafer (Ed.). Hofheim: Wolke-Verlag.

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