Quite germane to this subject is a newsletter article from Prospect's culture critic Philip Clark. He ponders why the British general public, specifically those who enjoy 'classical music', have never taken to 'Germany's greatest living composer' [sic], Helmut Lachenmann. The LSO with Ilan Volkov performed his 40-minute My Melodies (a "labyrinth of rude noises and hardly-there orchestral whispers") at the Barbican last week To quote a short excerpt from Clark's essay:
"In truth, his music has never been an easy sell in this Britain—Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, for string quartet and orchestra, performed by the Arditti Quartet and Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Jonathan Nott at the 2013 Proms, provoked a mass mutiny and walkout among the audience, most of whom had no doubt come to hear Mahler’s Fifth in the second half. At the Barbican, a near capacity house listened attentively, with only a few people dashing for the exit—but there’s still a long way to go, I think, until classical audiences in the UK learn to truly love Lachenmann’s music.
"Why exactly does Lachenmann present British audiences with so many problems? When the Belgian composer Maya Verlaak called a 2014 piece All English Music is Greensleeves, her tongue was in her cheek, but her analysis did contain a kernel of truth. From Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to Harrison Birtwistle’s Earth Dances, English composers have excelled at evocations of landscape, but music like Lachenmann’s, which is essentially about music and how it sounds, has never been part of our national musical lexicon."
Or again:
"The problem, as Lachenmann hears it, is that as soon as a sound considered “beautiful” establishes itself as part of the compositional lingua franca, that’s the very moment its effectiveness fades; it becomes an effect, a too-easily-achieved emotional hook, rather than something genuinely beautiful rooted in sound. Lachenmann’s response is to shred accepted ideals of instrumental technique. A soaring melody on a violin communicates as being “beautiful” because listeners have been conditioned by the expectations of “good technique”. But what, Lachenmann asks, could happen if fingers trained to touch a string at a particular angle moved even a couple of millimetres to the left or right? What sounds lie secreted in the cracks?" The essence of music? Or non-music?
"In truth, his music has never been an easy sell in this Britain—Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied, for string quartet and orchestra, performed by the Arditti Quartet and Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Jonathan Nott at the 2013 Proms, provoked a mass mutiny and walkout among the audience, most of whom had no doubt come to hear Mahler’s Fifth in the second half. At the Barbican, a near capacity house listened attentively, with only a few people dashing for the exit—but there’s still a long way to go, I think, until classical audiences in the UK learn to truly love Lachenmann’s music.
"Why exactly does Lachenmann present British audiences with so many problems? When the Belgian composer Maya Verlaak called a 2014 piece All English Music is Greensleeves, her tongue was in her cheek, but her analysis did contain a kernel of truth. From Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending to Harrison Birtwistle’s Earth Dances, English composers have excelled at evocations of landscape, but music like Lachenmann’s, which is essentially about music and how it sounds, has never been part of our national musical lexicon."
Or again:
"The problem, as Lachenmann hears it, is that as soon as a sound considered “beautiful” establishes itself as part of the compositional lingua franca, that’s the very moment its effectiveness fades; it becomes an effect, a too-easily-achieved emotional hook, rather than something genuinely beautiful rooted in sound. Lachenmann’s response is to shred accepted ideals of instrumental technique. A soaring melody on a violin communicates as being “beautiful” because listeners have been conditioned by the expectations of “good technique”. But what, Lachenmann asks, could happen if fingers trained to touch a string at a particular angle moved even a couple of millimetres to the left or right? What sounds lie secreted in the cracks?" The essence of music? Or non-music?
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