Lachenmann Interview

L'Osservatore Romano has published a short interview with Helmut Lachenmann (italian text), who was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Music Biennale on October 3, with the following citation:

Beloved and controversial, Helmut Lachenmann's music has had and continues to have a profound influence on composers across at least two generations. His radical and utopian conception of a desiccated sound, stripped of semantic weight until it reaches a state that can be described as "mineral," emblematically marked the extreme consequences of the structuralist musical avant-garde. But at the same time—and this is perhaps the most interesting and surprising aspect—it has opened up a new world of sound, provocatively pushing the limits of perception. Born from a negative conception of the semantic horizon, it has ultimately unveiled a new idea of language and, so to speak, a new form of "virginity" of sound matter.

The interview, in its brevity, is enjoyable, and the award to Lachenmann is deserved (precisely 🙂 ), but the motivation worries me a little.

While I have no objections to the award, it's hard not to point out that the aforementioned motivation would be perfectly suited to some composers of electronic or, better yet, digital music. This music, however, is generally ignored, or at best tolerated, by most national festivals.

In recent years, in fact, we have witnessed the revival and "porting" (to use a computer term) of ideas developed in electronic and digital music to the instrumental realm. Spectral music itself, which, for goodness' sake, has produced remarkable works in the hands of composers like Grisey, Murail, Radulescu, and many others, is nothing more than a technically improbable instrumental adaptation of ideas already developed and used for years in digital music.

And I say "technically improbable"; Because it's absurd to ask a violinist to play a D sharp sharp of 28 cents, as it's the 23rd harmonic of an A at 110 Hz, even if, thank goodness, it's approximated to a quarter tone. Classical instruments aren't made for this, and in my opinion, from a technical standpoint, the entire notion of instrumental spectral music is merely an idea, a concept, a source of inspiration. It's essentially an ideal that's roughly translated into a score, which, in turn, is roughly translated into performance. The only way to truly do this is to use a digital system, which, after all, was done long before by people like Truax and Risset.

The same argument can be applied, ultimately, to things like Ligeti's soundscapes (he remains a great composer). Likewise, Lachenmann's instrumental musique concrète is beautiful, but, in my opinion, it hasn't at all "opened up a new world of sound by provocatively pushing the limits of perception." Elaborations of instrumental and non-instrumental sounds that do the same thing have always existed in analog and digital musique concrète.

So, without any polemical intent, I wonder how much longer a large part of the academic music world will persist in remaining as unplugged as possible, and whether this is due to aesthetic reasons or simply to the fact that electronic, digital, laptop-based music, etc., undermines consolidated market mechanisms ensured by the triad of composer-publisher-music. interpreter.

In other words, is it just the lack of a standard score for electronic instruments that causes the problem, or is there more to it?

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