GRIS SWIHINBANK (/) MENU A Structure of Physicalities Helmut Lachenmann’s temA ‘head of Trio Atem (hitp/www.myspace.com/trioatem)'s per formance at Kings Place (bitpsLiuww.kingsplace.couk/whats- on-book-tickets/musicltrio-atem) next week, I thought 1 would share this essay on the work which brought them to- gether: Helmut Lachenmanris tem. It is a work that l imagine will have been a reference point or at least in the backs of com- posers’ minds as they wrote for the wonderful Gavin, Nina and. Alice and explored the unusual combination of flute, voice and cello, It certainly was for me. 1fyou do want to hear the work before reading or —much bet- ter —coming to Kings Place on Monday, here is a recording by Boston's ‘Though as thorough an examination of performance techniques employed as lies at the core of that analysis is less helpful here given tema’s heterogeneous instru- ‘mentation, a similar cack will be taken in terms of grasping the ‘concrete’ sound-world employed and the journey through it offered to che audience by way of dramatic transformations of the sound material. This method is particularly usefil in ap- proaching the elements of Lachenmannis post-serial musical language that break away from easily divisible hierarchies of pitch and rhythm and move towards what might be called tim- bral composition, though the associations that that term could suggest with Klangfarbenmelodie oF other ‘colourful! music is somewhat misleading. Here the timbre is not a colouring of musical material (harmonies and melodies, pitch sets and rhythmic rows perhaps) its the musical material. Written in 1968, tema, for flute, voice and cello, is one of Lachenmannis break-through works in terms of developing his early aesthetic ideas and style, Described variously as marking ‘the beginning of Lachenmann’s maturity as a composer’ and ‘the first work to demonstrate Lachenmann’s mature aesthetic {ideas and techniques’ i i also one of the first works in his output to have been performed regularly until the present day, > Ithas been recorded twice; first in 1994 by members of Ensemble Recherche for the now defunct Montaigne Auvidis Tabel and in 2009 on a disc by Ensemble Phorminx for German contemporary music label Wergo. + Lachenmann has described fema, a single movement work ast- ing roughly a quarter of an hour, as ‘probably one of the first compositions in which breathing is explored as an acoustically mediated energetic process. 5 Thetile plays on the German ‘words ‘item! (breath) and “Thema! (theme), making it clear for even an audience member without recourse to. progeammenotes that the work's theme is breath, Lachenmann has ac- nowledged that others had examined the same phenomenon from various different perspectives’ (he mentions Heinz Hol- liger, Vinko Globokar, Mauricio Kagel, Dieter Schnebel, and specifically Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen and Gydrgy Ligeti's Aventures), though he suggests they came to such simi- lar interests independently of one another. + Lachenmann is right to recognise his predecessors and contemporaries. Writing at che same time as Lachenmann penned the quoted note on temA, Istvan Anhalt also identified the trend for ‘new compositions for the voice that use it in ways other than exclu- sively in the usual singing mode, including ‘such marginal sounds as coughing, sighing [and] audible breathing, which bburgeoned from the mid-t950s onwards, listing over 60 com- posers he believed to be representative ofthe trend by the mi 1960s, a trend that perhaps confirmed Roland Barthes's belief that ‘the human voice is {a site which escapes all science, for there isno science which exhausts the voice. + ‘There are relatively ew works involving voice in the authorised list of Lachenmann's compositional output, which numbers fifty-four works to date. Three works involving the voice, Conso- lation 1 ‘Consolation _it (espdLouwchrisswithinbank.net/2010/1u/the-inward-beauty- fhelmut-lachenmann/4consolation-ij) and tem, stem from 1967-68, atime that might be identified as an international, in- tellectual crisis period, but also — and not necessarily uncon- nectedly —a time that can be described asa period of vital de- velopment for Lachenmann the composer. After these years of intense engagement with the voice Lachenmann didnit return to it as a central focus of a work until the 1990s with ...2wei efile, Musik mit Leonando (991-92), which incorporates two speakers of fragmented texts into a large ensemble, followed by his opera (or ‘music with images) Das Madchen mit den Sclnvefehlzern (1990-96). Though a few works in the interven- ing years do involve voi se — notably Kontrakadens (1970-70), which incorporates some voices recorded onto tape, and Salut fr Caudwell (1977) in which the two guitar soloists recite frag- ‘mented texts that foreshadow the speech of ..zwei Gehl." — there is a noticeable defining, exploring and exhausting of vocal possibilities in the three early works, which leads one to speculate whether they were perhaps fundamental to Lachen ‘mantis transition into maturity as an instrumental composer. Piotr Grela-Moiejko writes that ‘for decades, the vocal ‘medium served avant-garde composers in times of doubt and tial’, suggesting that when using a text it can ‘be considered a carrier of formal continuity and unity, [41 a skeleton around hich the flesh of the piece is built up. + This thesis is ex- tremely convincing when applied to the two Consolations. Bothare small-scale choral works, the first for 12 voices and 4 per- cussionists and the second for 16 voices a capella, which set short texts rich in phonetic resonances — an extract from ex- pressionist playwright Ernst Toller's Masse Mensch and an sth- Century prayer, the Wessobrunner Gebet, respectively. Disas sembling their respective texts through phonetic analysis that aims to reveal an inherent logic of sound construction, the Consolations might be said to put into practice the theory set cout cight years earlicr in a lecture Lachenmann wrote for his teacher and friend Luigi Nono to give at the Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, which defends such dismantling of texts (criticised by Stockhausen) with reference to the his- torical removal of semantic meaning from and phonetic treat- rent of texts, with examples from Gesualdo, Gabrieli, Bach and Mozart. + The text of Consolation II, a meditation on finding God in the nothingness before time, is dissolved into a shuddering landscape of letters, hissing with a hollow wind, shivering with rolled ‘Rs, stuttering away into the nothingness Where God can perhaps be found, ending on the't'of Gott’, not sung but struck: two fingers coming together in a quiet clap. ‘While hardly revolutionary — similar phonetic treatment of texts had been in use for almost a decade by Nono, Berio and Ligeti among others — the Consolatioss mark an personal stepping stone for Lachenmann towards tema and farther on towards his mature style. In particular, the ‘nstra- sportant ‘mental voealisation and vocal instrumentalisation illustrated both by the ending ‘t of Consolation It and the consistent at- tempts to bring vocalist and percussionist sonically closer in Consolation 1, would prove 2 vital resource in the writing of temA. Despite their similarities, tem bears several marked contrasts with the Consolations. The simplest is the lack of pre-existing text. Instead of choosing a ‘skeleton’ to flesh out, al the vocal sations — whether phonetically disintegrated or semantically fact — are written specifically for certain passages and. therefore ‘do not have to be understood by the listeners since they serve to modify the exhalation in a specifically conceived manner’. As we shal see though, this abnegation of po- tential semantic transmission is nor necessarily entirely con- sistent and definitely not holistic. The second difference be- tween the Consolations and tema is an uncomplicated but deci- sive question of instrumental resources. The choral medium al- lowed for extremely textural text setting that opened up large aural spaces and environments, whereas the constraints ofthe solo voice related via breath to the lute related via line tothe cello in fem, while benefiting from the reduced distance be- ‘oveen voice and instrument exploited in the Consolation, re- quire an economy of treatment and tight focus on sound quali ties to achieve the sort of timbral cohesion advocated inLachenmanns 1966 essay ‘Klangtypen der Newen Musik’. = Grella- Modejko describes this asinear music at its most com- promising — there is nothing to bind these three instruments together except the very delicate equating of sound-types to create the sort of timbral continuum that would become fun- damental to many later works, especially those scored for chamber ensembles. % As it transpires, this allying of sound-types is not exclusively a matter of aligning sonic simi- larities, bur also of drawing parallels between the actions of the performers. This is a compositional approach, which Lachen- ‘mann later verbalised (and has since frequently restated) say- ing, composing means building an instrument’, tema explores the possibilities offered by musicians and their instruments not just in terms of sounds available, but also in the physical relationships these various methods of sound pro- duction exhibit. For the first time, Lachenmann is able to make the performers’ physical effort the work's theme both through its directly resultant sound and through the use of sound ma- terial that intimates particular physical processes. This may sound loftily theoretical, even fanciful, but itis in fact essen- tially visceral. One of the paradoxes of musical aesthetics is how on the one hand, the development throughout the 19th- Century into the 20th ofthe belief that somehow music offered the most sublime of forms beyond physicality — to the extent that, to use Walter Pater's oft-quoted axiom, ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’ —led to a denigration of the physical element that is perhaps more obviously present in certain folk idioms; while on the other hand, the repeated affirmation, since the advent of recording techniques and es- pecially electroacoustic music, that these ghosts of physical performance are strongly lacking an element which can be no dimension other than the physical (no matter what claims are made for ‘aura or other such terms). 1s This lack of imme acy or clear perceptbility ofthe causality of sounds and music has long been a weight on composers working with disembod- ied media. This paradox suggests that the physical aspect of performance cannot be so easily dismissed as only a small or inconsequential part of the musical experience In attempting to highlight both the importance of a gesture as ‘an energy-motion trajectory which excites the sounding body’ and the difficulty an electroacoustic composer faces in the lack of an (observable) ‘agent’ to perform the physical counterparts to their music's sounding gestures, Denis Smalley may give us a key to understanding something of Lachenmann's thinking. Lachenmann has described his music from the late: onwards as musique concréte instrumentalé, adapting Pierre Schaefer's name for tape music using recorded ‘concrete’, ie. real world, sounds as its compositional material, but ‘instead.of using the mechanical actions ofthe everyday instrumentally as musical elements, for me it was about recognising the in- strumental sound as a sign of its production method’. = (achenmann was familiar with studio techniques after work- ing at the [PEM-Studio in Ghent in 1965, during which period he wrote his only solo tape work Szenario.) In his 1983 com- ‘mentary on tem, he acknowledges the work as marking ‘the first step for me towards a “Musique concréte instrumentale” Ir is fitting then pethaps, given the direct line drawn by Lachenmann between early fixed media composition and his own instrumental music, that Smalley’s writing on electroa- coustic problematics describes so clearly some of the funda- rentals of Lachenmanns approach. In addition to Grella-Motejkos contention that the voice can provide support to a composer in the process of development and experimentation due to its potential for providing reliable structural cohesion outside of what might be termed, slightly misleadingly, the ‘purely musical grammar of a work, there 1ay be another good reason as to why Lachenmann chose the voice and the breath as the subject of lema’s experimentation or why it transpired to lend itself so well othe development he achieved with this work. 1» Smalley comments on the power of the voice in music, stating that ‘vocal presence [..J has direet hhuman, physical and therefore psychological links’. » For Lachenmann these ‘physical links’, which Smalley proposes survive even the complete disembodiment encountered. in electroacoustic music, may have proved useful in explicating the physieal processes of sound production that he wished to draw attention to, our deep engagement with this corporeal energy conversion aiding his aesthetic intentions. ‘Though not an area of theory Lachenmann has ever discussed detail, here is an affinity between his wish, based on post- Adornian concepts of alienation, to subvert traditional instru~ ‘mental performance technique to reveal the effore ofthe musi- cian — symbol of the repressed servant to the bourgeoisie, or- dered in the 19th-Century concerto tradition to complete feats of eruel agility and difficulty beneath a fagade of painless case —and che theories of corporeity of Marcel Mesleau-Ponty, a Merleau-Ponty describes the body as ‘a knot of living mean- ings’, an idea that lends credence to the possibility that the physical actions of musicians could be understood as 2 matrix of meanings bearing the potential for their structural percep- tion, Particularly relevant for out understanding of the physical aspect of Lachenmann's work is the idea that the meaning of a gesture intermingles with the structure of the world that the gesture outlines’ and that linguistic gestures Sjust represent ways for the human body to celebrate the world and ultimately to live if 21 “This also ties in with Lachen-mantis advocacy of ‘music as existential experience’. » The voice's eventual movement from spoken or sung bearer of ex- trinsic semantic content to a subverted instrument, taking its place as part of a self-defining structural grammar construct- ing its own incrinsic value, ove the course of temA points as it were to Lachenmanris subsequent, voiceless works, moving away from the Ur-vocalisation supposedly at the root of music's inception, away from music as message and music as speech, towards his aesthetic ideal of music asa holistic expe- rience as affecting and meaningless as walking through a land- scape in the rai.