Lachenmann

Piano Studies at NYU Steinhardt
presents

21st-Century Wanderers: Jonathan HARVEY / Helmut LACHENMANN
Manuel LAUFER, piano
Dorothea HAYLEY, soprano

Friday, December 13 (2021? during Covid?) at 8 pm
Black Box Theatre, 82 Washington Square East

I could not imagine better performances of these pieces. Manuel Laufer and Dorothea Hayley are highly skilled, passionate devotees of Harvey and Lachenmann, and their committment and love was evident throughout.

Since this performance, years ago, I’ve been think about Lachenmann’s Got Lost (texts by Friedrich Nietzche, Fernando Pessoa) for soprano & piano.

Is Lachenmann catching on the US? I was given the score of his guitar duo at Columbia U over ten years ago. Columbia, like NYU, is very much a node in the wormhole to Central European modernism.

Wikipedia:

Lachenmann has referred to his compositions as musique concrète instrumentale, implying a musical language that embraces the entire sound-world made accessible through unconventional playing techniques. According to the composer, this is music in which the sound events are chosen and organized so that the manner in which they are generated is at least as important as the resultant acoustic qualities themselves. Consequently those qualities, such as timbre, volume, etc., do not produce sounds for their own sake, but describe or denote the concrete situation: listening, you hear the conditions under which a sound- or noise-action is carried out, you hear what materials and energies are involved and what resistance is encountered.[2]

Menachem Zur gave a talk at Sarah Lawrence. He recounted his teacher’s vision for noise music and noise forms. His teacher was Mario Davidovsky. Davidovsky cracked the pitch nut through some striking moves, especially a move involving the all-interval tetrachord, bringing a low note that casts a new light on what was set up. Davidovsky developed his own very distinctive orchestratonal moves and gestures that never came across as ends in themselves, but kept pitch as an equal partner in the counterpoint. It’s my impression that a rich pitch life prevented Davidovsky from pursuing the noise agenda he outlined. That noise agenda is now being pursued rigorously in the UK and EU.

In New York, we can get some idea about what’s going on in Europe and the UK at NYU & Columbia, and few other places. Soon, RSF & Cygnus will present a work commissioned by Paul Griffiths and his hand-picked composer Trevor Baca, who might be the young American composer who is tune with European modernism at this moment.

I am looking for something here. I’m going to take a sprint at it.

–The US modernists who all just died – Babbitt to Boykan – were doing important work in the shadows after the attention shifted elsewhere. While in that shadow they achieved much clarity and surpassed their earlier work.

–Their focus was on pitch. It was highly contentious. In fact, they all hated each other, but in hindsight we can see a great deal of shared values and shared goals.

–The present focus on timbre & noise will freshen the conversation about pitch in the end. That’s what I hear in Lachenmann’s Got Lost. What he does with pitch I find interesting, and it comes out of a focus elswhere.

–the focus on microtones will also bring us back to visions for how pitch works in counterpoint with rhythm and timbre through richly parsed timescapes. Microtones will freshen pitch. In many specific cases, microtones are a way for composers to get pitch off of their backs. Pitch is too fraught. Pitch is oppressive.

–Likewise, post-minimalism. Rather than eliminate pitch or deny it, brought it back to Perotin, as Steve Reich avers. From there it can grow in so many interesting directions. I quite like the way John Adams’ work began with some very loud tributes to Phillip Glass. The 3:2 polyrhtyms in early works like Harmonielehrer remindme of Phillip Johnson’s AT&T building chippendale. From there, Adams’ work differentiated, individuated, grew from a village to a grand city. There’s a Medieval number in El Niño.