Contemporary Music Review Vol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 81 – 90
Sections of Exergue1/Evocations/ Dialogue with Timbre Frank Abbinanti
This article is a pastiche of brief thoughts that I hold on six important works by Helmut Lachenmann: Guero and Serynade for piano, his first string quartet, Gran Torso, a duo for guitars called Salut fu¨r Caudwell, his opera Das Ma¨dchen mit den Schwefelho¨lzern, and his double concerto NUN. As a pianist, the thoughts on the techniques used in the two piano works are hopefully insightful to new pianists looking to broaden their repertoires. The other two works are discussed briefly and again mention some technical elements and my general reactions to them, this time from a listener’s viewpoint. These sections come from a longer article with the same title. Keywords: Extended Techniques; Guitar; Listening; Music Theatre; Opera; Piano; String Quartet Vessels of Timbre Often I have wondered how it is possible to communicate from great distances via timbre, Klang, a sound transmitted over the waters. Not the media, as we know all too well. How flageolets, for instance, can fix our imagination, or timbres as am Steg, pizzicati, or the sustained muted tuba, which is like a beacon of light. Extended/ distended timbres they call them, and they have no reason for being other than a subversive language for the aesthetic of a time perhaps now in exile for all time. In Lachenmann’s Gran Torso (1971 – 1972, with later revisions), one must remember that silences are also transmitted. It makes the timbres breathe, gives them a space, a place that is free for now. This is a work for string quartet that hardly exists at all. For some composers, the creativity of others in music is perhaps more important than at any other time for this state of exile. Yet Gran Torso creates no dialogue and it does not care to do so. It is simply shapes of pra´gma (timbral facts), configurations of am Steg—dull and/or resonant—glissandi, beautiful and ugly flageolets, scrapes, griffe la tolle, pencil-thin pizzicati, out-of-tune at times. Can one still say the word ‘ugly’, or does it denote something else? Adorno thought about this—how the materials of music transform themselves, find and search for new ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285690
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contexts, new ways of affirming an existence. Gran Torso reveals nasal sounds, sul tasto, flute-like, as well as like the slow opening of an old wooden door. It is a music committed to thought and duration of space, so that one can think deeply about where he is today. Do not look at the date. Lachenmann composed this work relatively early, when the radical moments were starting to turn down the street: away, but from what? From liberation, from view. It is music for all time. It is a tortured sound with an anxiety to change the world, and its tensions will remain unresolved forever. Was that not the utopian factor for music proclaimed? Bloch and Adorno debated Utopie in the 1960s, as well as Herbert Marcuse, immediately before the anti-Vietnam rebellions. How far the paradigm has changed now; instead of the icon of Lenin, there is the one of Islam as the source for all hatred on the globe. Against these vagaries, this new paradigm, how can timbre and its complex configurations find a voice? Gran Torso then has a longevity factor contained in its uncompromising constitution. Ju¨rgen Habermas says somewhere that the European experience had eclipsed the implications of modernity. So its music and art, words and texts, shapes and colors, had to live beneath the ground in a cell or a darkened attic; musical scores hidden in a chest of drawers or a wooden trunk tied with rope. For these silent spaces, these voids help shape the heard timbre. Silences give the heard timbre power and mystery in many ways, like sunlight caressing the wooden floor, the floor tiles gently and without sound. We hear only our own breathing or footsteps. Silences transform our memory, impart remembered atrocities or shapes of beauty into these silences. Many find no beauty in the noise of Lachenmann, but it is not noise! It has its own language of introspection and seriousness, as if looking back on the century just lived. Timbre’s work occasionally breaks its constitution with predictable pulse-like events as in Salut fu¨r Caudwell for two guitars (1977), which has more accessible features. Perhaps the Marxism Caudwell espoused is here again providing culture for activism. It seems that politics has always worked on Lachenmann from the inside out; he never used the Left’s icons for his work or as a point of reference. Instead, he thought that it was there anyway for one to decipher or not. Speaking with one’s instrument was to be an important genre for the political composer. Examples include Christian Wolff and Dave Smith. Timbre here has another life: it is not timbre anymore; instead it is sequestered and mannered with the voice. A new service is at work and timbre now must serve a higher pursuit of freedom—the cause of liberation. Can one still speak in those terms? Timbre can be stopped; Mao’s Red Guards broke the fingers of those who played bourgeois music; its life now is something less free, encumbered with predictable gestures. The artificial speaking thus reminds me of children coming into the room, asking questions, accompanied by their instrument. The Parvenus/Counterfeit Timbre In today’s world, we are saturated with history, obsessed with things of the past. We of course remember whatever we care to remember and forget whatever is not useful
Contemporary Music Review 83 or unpleasant to us now in the present of earning profit, of living, thinking, breathing, or making noises. Of all the multiple CDs of junk space one may acquire, not even the experience of recordings, compact discs cannot convey what real actual timbre conveys. Can we simply encounter this minimal beauty? This experience was once called ‘cheap thrills’, and today all of what we hear and experience is through electronic media and thus not live. There is a short circuit. We live now in a distanced impersonal relation to performance. Concerts of new music are likewise infiltrated with mixed-media video, prerecorded tape events and live electronics. We should return to the real acoustic timbre and there are those creators such as Lachenmann who work at a forgotten craft of timbre in isolation, this like a Dutch lens grinder. How much history is contained in the technique of playing the violin? The hand of the violinist motions on the black fingerboard, contracts his hand with the weight of the bow, horsehair. There is the intellect of history in each movement. Our electronics has no known equivalent; perhaps the computer is not an art yet. We all seem to work in solitude, separated from each other, cast away on an island of desire. Only the impervious, the opaque market of engaging telecommunications before the eye connects us with this unknowable void of non-history. It is the eye that is the vessel, less so the mind, hands or ears. The beautiful eyes of the human do not age. We look into our eyes and the countenance is as a child, yet vision—what we see and not what we hear—is how we are colonized within today’s democracies. So we work and some still inhabit places of the despondent, the explorer. Sometimes this place is a ghetto with nothing to practice, to learn the meanings of timbre again, to renew its mysteries and power. We do this in darkness. I have often thought of the nurturing of timbre (i.e. composing music) as the last great horizon for bourgeois culture, conveyed from great distances, indifferent in place of the known or unknown. One can dream of this place while working on a piece for orchestra, perhaps never to be played. Gazing at Lachenmann’s printed music, largely in his own hand, reveals pure graphic fascination. No one can understand this hand. Yet one can immediately see the lapidarian quality of his work. He would like to learn each instrument himself, as in the concerto for flute and trombone. In NUN, he wanted to play the trombone to find a feel for it. He carries his own violin to rehearsals to demonstrate where particular string flageolets reside. One senses that he does not hear his music as he writes it, because the speed of delivery and the durational space implicated and traversed has no time to breathe or reflect upon itself, as though it were late for something. The great density of the music also comes from preplanning and from living and working with the musical page of blank systems, but also from a Strukturschema, as is found in Fassade. There one finds a distributive scheme for timbre for the percussion section, so rhythmic space and duration is condensed in one place to see, not hear. One would often like to fill these barren measures, these five horizontal lines, quickly to suggest a drama. It would be quite interesting if one could come to know the signature of a composer strictly by the different graphic icons, shapes and lines one uses.
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One may think of the penumbral dimensions of space and gesture in Arcana by Edgard Vare`se; there lies a geometric darkness acquired from numerous sketches. It is music afraid of itself. He reaches for the stars in the language of Paracelsus, but finds only the debilitating tyranny of musical language to hold it to the earth. What an earth, with enormous orchestral forces, including a heckelphone; the timbral light, whenever it is allowed in, is via metallic percussion. It is an artificial light, one that he too had nurtured in exile. The various books contained in the E´tudes Australes of John Cage have an eternal dimension because they seek no one’s advice. They do not claim to be anything but another experience, un jour comme une autre. One finds timbre again as a template of the stars from an Australian map with wedges placed between the piano keys to assure resonance is affirmed and abated; the piano sound dies. It wakes itself only to find a changed dimension, as within a narrative between the door, which separates Kafka’s insect from the family in The Metamorphosis. It is conveyed in many ways; sometimes only partially in an incomplete state via a compact disc, or the score itself. We have many hours of pleasure with the printed image, the image from outside our place. Musical graphics become our mind of timbre. This again is only a partial transference, inchoate. We do not know how to complete this timbre. Performance! Timbre is something that must live inside the imaginative brain and as Lachenmann has said, timbre needs to renew itself every so often. Composers have memories of timbre. They must nurture this, as a novelist recalls things, places, objects, insects, etc. If one has little else today, one has marvelous techniques, learned from a book. Composers have struggled to learn where a voice resides, to land and return from exile. Cornelius Cardew instituted a self-imposed exile from the avant-garde, a place that accepted him with a warm heart. Later, like many others, he was searching for a committed music, one that could serve a cause of activism, a path unpretentiously to liberation. Timbre then was only useful if it contained the icons of the Left. Timbre cannot stop the placement of concrete walls of hatred but it can impart a voice for the dispossessed. In the face of this, the composer continues with graphic placement of a place that transmits something, an entity that the musicological philosophers continue to ponder in our administered world. Our timbre has been contented with the unbeautiful, the ugly. Modernity gave us timbre like something unborn, as we found it below in the imaginative waters of the Rhine, or in an uninhabited place in a forest of trees, searching for irresolution, as in Schoenberg’s Erwartung, within our own imagination. We quickly learned modernity’s narrative and the freedom it gave us. We still can work independently from the tyranny of the market if we choose to do so. We learned modernity’s deep-rooted complexities, fashioning geometrical configurations, fractal set theories, antiphonal spaces, tone filters, and polyrhythmic distributions across the globe. So we continue to practice. We become enchanted with the extended timbre, piano flageolets and multiphonics or ultra-thin string harmonics. We play these timbres everyday. We escape and continue to search for a language, one not everyone will understand, so we speak in a void many times, to no one. Yet timbre lives.
Contemporary Music Review 85 Comment Ces Deux Ide´es, Celle d’Espace Vide et. . . How can the idea of space in music and its construction be related? Through exploration of registers, movements have a signature through register, where music exists in its placement: high, middle and low treble, alto and basso. The measure of music today is an entire configuration of sound. As in Mahler’s symphonies, the bridges, the ‘spaces’ from major to minor, form the horizon. It is quite interesting that the late music of Luigi Nono tended to focus on particular timbral places, turning introspectively: Fragmente-Stille—an Diotima for string quartet, for instance, escaping from the island of Giudecca in Venice. Nono was also a man of exile, only obtaining Italian commissions through the Communist Party. Germany was more of a vibrant ground for him. Lachenmann’s Serynade for piano inhabits a ‘mystical’ place of above: the timbre with piano flageolets, of timbres heard and sustained after the struck tones. Also, the sostenuto pedal creates a wonderful pace to allow timbre a place. The piano has an enormous body of literature; it has a history from which it is difficult to run. Webern’s Variationen revealed another source for this world—points and durations defined as legato or staccato moments. It is for a moment an abandoned place. In Serynade, there is more, we can simply listen to the work above the sound and below the voice. The sound, the attack elicits a sotto voce. With piano flageolets, the sound always ascends above because of the overtones, the physical properties that can scatter these tones away from the basso regions. Abjection/Leben In the revolt of being, again modernity is our language, one of liberation, and it came into existence as a promise of good fortune, it made composers search for the absolute, to pulverize it, thus negating the subject. We did this at Darmstadt, Stanford, Urbana, and IRCAM. Even today with the pop culture content, composers are ones of fashion and cults: new complexity, minimalism, Zen indeterminacy, etc. This is far from the beginnings, such as the string music of Anton Webern, particularly the Trio or Fu¨nf Bagatellen, in which we sometimes sniff the sulfur of violence, the First World War with the liberal/excited use of am Steg, pencil-thin pizzicati and flageolets, threadbare and homeless. It was only many years later that Webern’s structures and durations found their way into the language of musical complexity, exhibited with violence, spatialized, morphed, and excreted in ways that soon found an end: the lamenting, stretched and screeching voices of Hiroshima from Penderecki’s string work. Yet we continue writing despite all the music already written. It is a place of dignity now to write only music that ascends to the realism of seriousness and vigour. It is better to be silent and not simply to write within the eternal re-treading of known genres such as the e´tude, sonata, opera or ballet. Lachenmann’s creativity is far more developed in the few works he has. He has no ‘collections’ of known genres other than string quartets. Perhaps the age works
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against this. The perfect act of writing, so says Giorgio Agamben, comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back. Neither Subject Nor Object Timbre endures in all times and for everyone. It is simply there to be used or expounded as a market-prod to fill a cashbox. Timbre inhabits duration as the time working in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There is the time of ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’, the time of Hamlet the fool parading in a masquerade for the incestuous court, the phantom time of Hamlet’s father returning, and the internal time of introspection in ‘to be or not to be’. We traverse timbre through durational schemes, guises that fit every conceivable pattern and configuration known to mankind. The designs and shapes from crystallography are used, although graphic notation has passed out of fashion. Geometric fractals are used as well to solicit an infinite place for timbre. It is counted, permuted, interpolated, excreted, loved and hated. Timbre is given priority like humans. Some timbres are more useful than others. Some timbres have more interesting shapes and inhabit warm places, academia, for instance; timbre can also be an incomplete and faithless opportunist. The plunger mute for the trombone has endless possibilities from the extreme percussive tonguing; you must hold the plunger firmly and blow fortissississimo. Vinko Globokar in Berio’s Sequenza V exploits this timbre. There is also the very soft sensual timbre for the sustained tone, and with a loose embouchure one can play the timbre giving it more ‘dirt’ or ‘grit’. In Lachenmann’s Serynade, one can listen to and experience the different flageolets as mists from the rarefied world, uncontaminated resonance. The ontology of this is perhaps well known from the flagellations of Schoenberg’s Op. 11 No. 1. Here, however, the tones there are like a mirror, lontano moments, an afterthought; something within another context. Luigi Nono called them ‘new silences’, but in Lachenmann’s piece the flageolets are a part of the language, the mists of the music’s voice and discourse. Timbre is no longer in complete exile. It has found a home without walls, interrogations or checkpoints. Serynade is the longest piano solo of Lachenmann. It is a kind of treatise and is very much like probing the life world of touch, the Aspekt des Anschlags, and harmonic reverberations. Perhaps this is the last horizon for the piano in terms of the exploitation of timbre. Here is an overview. Section A : Allegretto capriccioso There is much use of the sostenuto pedal here. The pianist also simply creates flageolets by silently pressing fingers down, while other tones act to excite those in silence. There is also taking over of the same note that was previously played. In the film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by Rainer Fassbinder, Petra, who is now a successful fashion designer, has a servant/secretary. She never speaks—she can but never does. Instead, she goes about Petra’s modern apartment working, typing,
Contemporary Music Review 87 getting drinks, picking up clothes, sketching and arranging airfare tickets. Remember the Master and Servant section from G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit? The Master exists for himself, but also must exist for the Other, that which is not his life world, to sustain one for the Other. The servant must thus exist for himself but also for the Master and has a life world that is lived out in silences, in crevices and darknesses, as a father sacrificing his life to preserve the welfare of his child. The flageolets are constituted much like Petra’s secretary/servant. Section B: Calmo quasi misterioso It is quite remarkable that contrast still lives, still has a structural/durational function within the language of modernity. This movement is like a resting-place where harmonic reverberations are heard and yet do not have the same function of an adagio movement from a symphony. The symphony was the Master Signifier, so says Jacques Lacan within another context. It was Mahler who said goodbye to beauty in his Symphony No. 9. There the Adagio resides at the very end of the work in a tonality with many flats, very dull in resonance for the strings. The La¨ndler movement says goodbye to the rural life world of stupidity, the innocence of childhood, perhaps. The Rondo Burlesque says goodbye to the metropolis, the city and the obsessions of Vienna, of science of the mind, games, chess and coffee, structures of massiveness, like the numerous ugly rivets that supports steel bridges of the Victorian era. So Mahler only knew the form of juxtaposition, accreting as the work progresses, restating, a predictable music materials and not predictable. Section C: Quasi liberamente, leggermente This material is e´tude-like with ascending/descending scales and glissandi, also repeated notes. The piano as the proletariat is an instrument that needs work continuously, or the tone dies—thus the repeated notes—but what then is the gesture of this? Repeated tones numb the mind; this section thus makes for incredible contrast to the two previous sections that were more mystical. Here perhaps the real world begins to show itself within Serynade. It is beautiful material because it is sparse, like snow falling quietly on a mountainside, or insects buzzing around the tree of a limb. One never hears the insect sound; merely imagine it freely. Section D Now there are more rigid flageolets with a predictable rhythm, like a pulse very similar to moments from Ein Kinderspiel (1980). There are also large forearm clusters that are introduced here, which are either all black keys or all white. The damper pedal creates a sub-rhythm where the foot abruptly releases the previous depressed right pedal. The noise comes from the damper felts falling on the internal strings, slapping them and creating another percussive timbre.
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Section E These moments are more abstract, as if the music materials have disintegrated, melted into fragments. The word ‘abstract’ has an interesting life and many times it misleads us. Here in Lachenmann’s music, as in all modernity, the disruption of tonality and atonality created new spaces, ones equivalent in flatness to the 12 tones that dodecaphonic music used. When flatness became the new paradigm for painting (Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, etc.), one could no longer speak of ‘abstraction’, but instead of the ‘drama’ of a smudge, pencil stroke or process of dripping paint. The Greeks had terms for what happens: fact (pra´gma), coincidence (tyche), outcome (te´los), surprise (apodeston) or action (dra´ma). So Lachenmann’s music makes us hear things that he does not necessarily represent to us, or at least he does not desire the mysteries of his music to be revealed in a single hearing. One knows nothing prior to the first listening experience of his Serynade. Section F This section interrupts section E and is fast with filigree moments, quicksilver, wistful, scherzo-like with tremoli yet furioso, and the pianist traverses the entire keyboard. Section G: Andante calmo Here there are tones that are important and prominent as individual voices, no longer an abstracted chorus, as in some of the previous sections. New timbre is added: plucking the strings inside the piano, as though one has arrived someplace. Stumm-Hinterland Something depressed silently sets off wonderful timbres, the influence of a creative person is eternal; someone to recognize the struggle onward, such as Lenin. We face similar situations and circumstances now that Bill Gates and Mickey Mouse have won the revolution. The new opacity or complaisance, the Undurchsichtlichkeit of which Habermas wrote, has created new places for composers. Follow a path to what today? Lachenmann still finds the implications of modernity as a vibrant means of working. He has always nurtured timbre from the beginnings of the unaccompanied solo works, although he falls into known forms in the Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied. Those were e´tudes of rhythm and again timbre, but like stepping-stones. Harmonica for tuba and orchestra is a work that staked a modernist claim. It was a means for discovering a voice and was written for the tubist Richard Nahatzki from 1981 to 1983. The tuba here has to struggle to assert itself, like it is a guest-worker, and needs to place itself safely within the context of its surroundings before it progresses to development and the assertion of its persona. The tuba timbre is given
Contemporary Music Review 89 freedom slowly, free to reshape its identity. There is a psychoanalytic concept that there is a short circuit between repression and what it represses, that of the superego. As Lacan has said, the essential content of the superego’s injunction is ‘Enjoy’! This situation is problematic. It is wonderful that a new repertoire has been created: the post-war avant-garde has been quite generous in the number of unaccompanied solos it has produced, but less so the concerto. Only Gyo¨rgy Ligeti and Lachenmann, amongst a few others, have pursued this genre with any degree of consistency, and once a concerto is written, there is only one, never another. ‘You can do your duty, because you must do it,’ so said Immanuel Kant. There are some well-known gestures in Harmonica within the musical material and it almost has mists of the literature of the post-Romantic era. The impacted sense of timbre, the wistful strident moments that quickly pass to others in obvious contrasts: low basso to high registers, soft pppp to loud ffffff, like the tensions of a suspension bridge. Perhaps it is the intervals that suggest this. The work has great power and great contraction of timbre in the lowest basso regions, albeit in short moments. Great violence and brutality is mixed with gentle sensitive lyricism in a moment’s notice. There are great blocks of sound—Einwu¨rfe—but here they are even more present than in NUN. The modern orchestration has become renowned as well. Above All, This Will Pass. . . The imagination is the vehicle. In Lachenmann’s Das Ma¨dchen mit den Schwefelho¨lzern, the form is that of an elliptical structure, a music that digresses from the traditional dramatic narrative. The story of the little match seller is simply present, it is not a verbatim portrayal: Musik mit Bildern is the genre. There are two sopranos that sing from the orchestral pit; both represent the little match girl. We have no direct contact with her through singing. Timbre and sounds comes from another place. She inhabits the black-and-white stage in thin clothes—white, transparent and fragile. Her persona floats through life in a state of highness, seeking something else within the bourgeois world, but there are two voices that interchange with speed. Their imagination filters within and through life wherever possible. In Lachenmann’s chosen text from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the little girl finds the warmth from the Christmas dinner setting she sees revealed through the windows while she roams the streets. In Vı´ctor Manuel Gaviria’s film La vendedora de rosas, Colombian children roam the streets in search of money to sniff glue until the morning hours. The speed of their little imaginations is accelerated well beyond the ugly life that surrounds them. They then sleep wherever it is possible to sleep. It is impersonal yet our humanity wants their lives to be decent. We also want Gudrun Ensslin to have a good life, to extinguish the anger, fear and hatred of her life. The 24 scenes run continuously for nearly two hours. The Andersen text is represented in the first 10 scenes (part 1). Part 2 is more the conscience of the work and features more commentary. Why is the world as it is? The stage has a gentle rhythm, that of visual holes where actors emerge slowly; this from the unbearable
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‘silences’ that open the work. The Andersen tale in Achim Freyer’s direction is represented with minimal pantomime. There is a subtext here as well, where Lachenmann the artist emerges and is part of the dangerous context: the state of the world where there is no longer a viable musical language, where one needs to be reinvented to sustain one’s creative life for long. Of course, the artist always has the market. Lachenmann finds viable ground here in this section, the experience of Leonardo da Vinci and his encounters with the fiery cave of Mongibello. The cave implies a metaphoric darkness, one associated with permanent aesthetic penumbrality that has inhabited bourgeois music drama since the 19th century. The temples of illumination within the Western canon—opera houses, museums and theatres—are places of darkness, cold and impersonal habitations where one simply submits to the granite power of its Greek columns and busts of men of power and certitude. The cave also acts as metaphor for the vagaries of creativity, for the hypocrisy that allows little children to inhabit a planet malnourished and as victims of kidnapping, incarceration, torture or worse. The subject of humanity, mythical, realistic or surreal, has been a frequent occurrence within the corridors of contemporary music. Dramatic invention of the modern era exists for itself, or it dies. Today creators have opted simply to attend as clever watchdogs with bated breath to the Master’s voice. The live corridor where concocted drama occurs does not dominate nor can it reveal a position to meaningfully comment. Can it then influence the world political discourse? I doubt it. So drama? That is to be dispossessed. Music drama is given a home for those who have neither nothing to say nor care to say anything. Our discourse is that administered from inside venture capital or higher; one where we have a leap of faith for/to the future, very similar to another plateau in Hegel’s system, one that lives, as most Americans on credit, on mounting debts that will never be repaid. Drama was supposed to disrupt the normative scheme of things, but why strive for something we already have? Dramatic invention claims to have the truth effect as working properly to enable communication, but is it true? Why then do we search again for identical experiences jumping ahead into another fiction? Our intellectuals only offer hope in ghosts of the past in the present spectres to come, or even better, a return to spirituality, since philosophy has not worked. The normative status then cuts, like the young magnetized by culture, to feel alive again, artificially cuts, but neither ever surmounts the debilitating deadlock of language. The citadel of the creative is the last vestige, still a place of exile yet one worth visiting now and then. Note [1] This is a term referring to citation borrowed from the literature of Jacques Derrida.
