Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

Four Questions Regarding New Music

Helmut Lachenmann
To cite this article: Helmut Lachenmann (2004) Four Questions Regarding New Music,
Contemporary Music Review, 23:3-4, 55-57, DOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285672
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0749446042000285672

Published online: 15 Sep 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 165

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gcmr20
Download by: [Monash University Library]

Date: 30 August 2016, At: 04:56

Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 55 57

Four Questions Regarding New Music

Helmut Lachenmann (translated by Oliver Schneller)

In this essay from MaeE, written in 1992, Lachenmann poses four signicant questions
about the present and future of New Music and also offers his thoughts on the subject.
Keywords: Criticism; Musical Politics; New Music

Where does New Music stand today, what does it want and what can it achieve?
New Music: a term, used in quotidian jargon, a meaningless, summary label for the
entirety of musical riches that lie outside of a denition of music which has been
tailored to the comfortable chamber of the edicational bourgeois household,
cementing tradition and therefore abusing it. The term refers to music that claims for
itself the occidental conception of art as cognitively reected, mind-controlled magic,
which centers the observation on its own structure and the structuredness of sound,
thus making it the essence of the perceptive self-experience by opening up ever new
paths of escape from the false securities embodied by an ostensibly smoothly
functioning (and administered), teachable (categories of taboos included) denition
of music.
Music that, since Schoenberg, has ceased to guarantee the creation of a consensus
with the paying audience (Richard Strauss) in a society of repressed contradictions
which it dares to confront with the unknown, or worse yet, with the unfamiliar, even
believing this society capable of withstanding such confrontation.
New Music as a realm of discovery for a mode of perception sensitized to
structures: there are the madrigals of Monteverdi and Gesualdo, there is Bachs Das
wohltemperierte Klavier, there is Mozarts Jupiter Symphony, Beethovens Pastoral
Symphony, Schuberts Winterreise, Wagners Tristan, Debussys Pelleas, Schoenbergs
Pierrot lunaire, Weberns cantata Das Augenlicht, Messiaens Quatuor pour la n du
temps, Nonos Il canto sospeso, Stockhausens Gruppen, Cages Winter Music, Ligetis
Apparitions, Xenakis Metastasis, and Feldmans King of Denmark: media of selfexperiencing perception, permanent and permanently refreshing challenges that
share nothing with the petried cultural rituals from which many a youth rightfully
recoils.
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285672

56

H. Lachenmann (trans. O. Schneller)

New Musicliving music and music for the living. More of a denition seems
impossible to me and more advocacy unasked for. (Stockhausen gave this response to
a gray-haired cellist asking why he was required to play something that did not
deserve to be called music: So that you may stay young. . .).
Todays youth grows up amidst a potentially vast but in actuality one-sided world of
musical experience that has its origins somewhere in between rock, pop, jazz, classical
music (old and new), and music that is old and new, closer and yet farther away, or
culturally more or less familiar. How important is the encounter with New Music in
music education?
Encounters with the tendencies in music of our time should basically be a natural
requirement. It is a requirement, however, that calls for adequate motivation on the
side of the teachers. If this is not present, a dialectical training of human senses on a
general level is preferable: this means exercising the perceptive faculties through the
senses and through thinking, as well as creating an awareness for the frequently
experienced fear of the unfamiliar (the foreign), which at the same time represents a
chance to expand the conscience through exposure and contact with the unfamiliar in
the broadest sense: foreign cultures, foreign races, foreign lifestyles, and taboos,
because from this perspective, the aesthetic stone of contention will become equally
politicized.
Why is Schoenbergs music ( = New Music) so difcult to understand?, asks Alban Berg
and he goes on to show, by way of various analyses of Schoenbergs (and therefore
contemporary new) music, that it need not be so if the listener were only to approach it
intellectuallyby listening and identifying. As a composer, which possibilities do you see
that could bring teachers and students closer to each other when it comes to conveying
and gaining knowledge of New Music?
For the composer there is no way to be cooperative: often he is already closer than the
listener would want him to be. The composers offer should be an encounter, in
whatever form, a willingness to express and share what he is doing and feeling, even
publicly. His artistic contribution can only be an uncompromising clarity of
language. Analysis or intellectual pondering do not always offer solutions to
everything and everyone and, by the same token, cannot replace the act of leaping
into insecure territories.
The notion of pedagogical music seems dangerous to me in the sense that it is a
pick-up and delivery service, which amounts to sweet-mouthing (something that
always gives itself away). If such exemplary works, suitable to act as didactic models,
are at all thinkable, then only so as coarsely sharpened denitions. Nothing is as clear
and yet mysterious as Anton Weberns Symphonie, Op. 21 or the Kontra-Punkte of
Stockhausen. I myself have won over listening and actively perceiving individuals
(while ridding myself of false friends) with my supposed anti-cello piece Pression.

Contemporary Music Review 57

What would you recommend to teachers who are reluctant to handle New Music as they
know (expect or believe) that students will reject it?
One cannot cover New Music as one covers the Fijian islands in a geography lesson,
with a teacher who has never been there himself. The teacher ought to be a Fijian
himself, introduce himself accordingly and should, when confronted with a position
of animosity and indifference, act on the basis of his own enthusiasm and experience
in order to come across as credible. This will yield him respectat least among
people of goodwill. If he can muster up the intellectual power (which should be
required of him as a teacher), he will reveal and identify the impotence and lack of
freedom inherent in such a position, as well as its cynically exploited strivings for
comfort and security, thus striking up a dialogue that uncovers and confronts these
denials (wherein the true challenge of his profession lies).
Only someone ill prepared or insufciently informed and motivated would shy
away from such conict. There are no recipes. Strategies need to be extracted from
each situation: it is a constant challenge to the communicative creativity of the
teacher. The expressive power of Nonos Il canto sospeso, the exciting vivaciousness of
Stockhausens Gruppen, the transcendence of the listening situation in Cages Atlas
Eclipticalis cannot be learned; it must transmit itself. One can only tryin whatever
wayto create situations, which bring people back in touch with their concealed
(and contused) antennae and therein with their own creative potential.