Expanding Tradition
Yesterday, I commented on the Educate Audiences aspect of the Taking Note report. I mentioned that most non-musicians were fascinated by new music and usually approached it with open minds. I also referred to composers Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann and I found an interview with Lachenmann in which he discusses his music in relation to audiences. Here’s a short exerpt:
Your unique discourse of unpitched sounds or noises is often considered a rejection or critique of what you have called the ‘bourgeois aesthetic apparatus’. Yet in your recent work from Ausklang onwards there has been a distinct project to re-integrate conventional tones and intervals into your music - as well as some almost familiar types of musical gesture. What led you to re-introduce these things into your work? Is the sort of complete rejection that typifies a work like Gran Torso no longer necessary?
I do not agree at all. From Wiegenmusik from 1963, through Ein Kinderspiel from 1980 and up to my recently written Concertini you can find music without unpitched sounds or noises. I never wrote against the ‘bourgeois aesthetic apparatus’ – but I enriched it, I opened it, and writing a piece like Gran Torso was a wonderful trio of discoveries. Another form of beauty.
The so-called polemical aspect always came from an audience which preferred to stay in the cage of their habitudes. In this sense my music is part of an old tradition, from the wonderful chorale harmonisations of Bach which were shocking in his time, through Beethoven’s banalities in his last works until Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, which even today are not really swallowed by society. Each authentic creative act which opens the aesthetic horizon just by a certain creative enthusiasm could be considered as an attack ‘against’ the society, but it is not. It is a serene invitation to open one’s mind.
So my problem was never ‘new sounds’ or new elements such as noises – my problem was to stipulate another context for a liberated way of perception. To work with extended playing techniques and noises or deformed sound elements was a helpful method to approach this idea. And I love my works like Gran Torso, Kontrakadenz, Air, Pression etc. because in a lazy society they got a quasi-heroic aspect. They provoked eclats, scandals etc. But they never had to do with rejection – except that the bourgeois audience rejected them. Now these pieces are more successful than all the more moderate pieces – because they still are ‘fresh’.
But provocation today is a medium of entertainment. And I am about to find new horizons by going into the cage of the lion: it is fascinating to take a minor third, played totally normally, and to make it sound like an unknown acoustic experience. There is a big difference between to look back – which is sometimes necessary – and to go back – which I never did. Only very superficially-thinking people could be disappointed by my development. They want to see me in a certain corner and now they cannot find me there again. I smile about it. And I hope.
It is interesting to see that a composer that has turned music upside down in the ways that Lachenmann has view his technique of expanding a tradition, rather than going against it. The remark of his music as a serene invitation to open one’s mind shows how Lachenmann believes that people are capable of understanding art to varying degrees. This comment echoes what the Taking Note report revealed about audiences. Many composers seem to adopt this view as well, and the standpoint of the composer as an artistic martyr is becoming quite antiquated. Evidence of more symphony orchestras commissioning and advocating music from living composers suggests a public interest in new music and the want to expand the artistic experience.
