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Dialectic and Form in the Music ofHelmut LachenmannDavid LesserPublished online: 15 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: David Lesser (2004) Dialectic and Form in the Music of Helmut Lachenmann,Contemporary Music Review, 23:3-4, 107-114, DOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285735

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Dialectic and Form in the Music ofHelmut LachenmannDavid Lesser

The following article is an exploration of the impact of Louis Althusser, amongst others,on the work of Helmut Lachenmann. It demonstrates the correlations between Althusser

and Marx and dialectic and form in Lachenmann’s music.

Keywords: Althusser; Analysis; Criticism; Dialectic; Form; History; Marx

Helmut Lachenmann’s challenging and uniquely beautiful music offers an extensive

range of intriguing possibilities for analysis, discussion and creative response by othermusicians and listeners. These possibilities have for too long largely gone ignored,especially in the English-language musical community.

If we are to move beyond the few conventional views of Lachenmann’s work thathave already outlived their (initial) usefulness and become cliched, then it will be

necessary to re-examine a number of the aesthetic premises that are all too frequentlyassumed in much English-language scholarship when writing about developments in

post-war German music and culture.When confronted with the challenges posed by a substantial and complex oeuvre

of major and highly innovative works that do not accommodate themselvesparticularly well within the horizons of conventional analysis, it is more than ever

necessary to explore new avenues of enquiry that may allow us to gain further accessinto their aesthetic, procedural and formal horizons. An important first step in thisprocess would be to identify those areas of aesthetic and wider philosophical

implication that have traditionally been undervalued or ignored in much previouswriting and thus to signal the need for future scholarly engagement to create a

framework more suited to further investigation.The following text is intended to map out some of the issues involved in studying

Lachenmann’s formal thought (an area of enquiry that has been particularlyneglected—indeed some critics have gone as far as to suggest that his work is

essentially ‘formless’ in any conventionally analysable sense, and for which many ofthe current analytical tools that have been developed during the last half century in

Contemporary Music ReviewVol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 107 – 114

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285735

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response to the work of other composers are ill equipped to respond): it is hoped that

it will function as the basis for further investigation and discussion in the future. Iwill suggest that one of the most potentially fruitful of these avenues for future

exploration is to reappraise and examine the dialectic structures used as a means ofarticulating large-scale musical forms in many of the composer’s most significant

scores. Further, I will also suggest that, to maximise the conceptual benefits that thisline of inquiry brings, it is necessary to move beyond the conventional Aristotelian or19th-century understanding of the nature of the dialectic process itself and examine

Lachenmann’s practice in the light of newer dialectic models, in particular thosesuggested in the work of Louis Althusser.

Locating Lachenmann’s Achievement

Helmut Lachenmann’s work poses unique aesthetic challenges for both his listeners

and other composers and performers. Although it is possible to locate his oeuvrewithin the developing global context of post-war European Modernism (and thiswould in itself be a highly useful cultural exercise), Lachenmann has, in rigorously

developing and exploring his own creative horizons, produced a body of work thatdefines itself largely by the aesthetic tensions and paradoxes inherent within this

particular stream of Modernism, and this movement’s own (much argued)progressive disintegration during the latter half of the 20th century as a viable

meta-aesthetic. Lachenmann’s music, together with his various theoretical and othermiscellaneous writings (collectively published as MaeE; Lachenmann, 1996), are a

source of fascinating potential for exploring these aesthetic tensions that lie at theheart of so many aspects of European contemporary music.

Lachenmann’s work is firmly embedded in its origins within the generaldevelopment of European Modernism at a particular stage in its history: it is notan eccentric, isolated or even outdated development, as has been suggested by some

hostile to his work.In common with some other major German composers, such as his approximate

contemporaries Dieter Schnebel and Hans-Joachim Hespos, and most obviously theolder figure of Bernd Alois Zimmermann (whose late music certainly moves towards

some of the aesthetic and textural regions explored in Lachenmann’s contemporarypieces), but unlike others, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lachenmann’s work stems,

in its inception, as opposed to many of its actual sonic characteristics, from theconflicting influences and pressures particular to the broad trends of Modernismwithin the history of German or related German language 19th- and 20th-century art,

culture and social critique. (Any exploration of the actual sonic phenomena ofLachenmann’s mature work would have to be widened to take into account the

crucial influences of non-German composers such as Harry Partch, Iannis Xenakisand his teacher Luigi Nono.)

This is in no way an attempt to localise or provincialise Lachenmann’s work, nor isit to suggest that the composer is himself oblivious to other musical developments in

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the rest of the world (again, the influences of Nono and Partch are highly suggestive).

The traditional myth of Germanic cultural otherness is an extremely problematicconcept that will not be debated further in this text; rather, it is a recognition of the

fact that many of the aesthetic tensions that Lachenmann has creatively explored andexploited throughout his career are most clearly to be grasped through a wider

understanding of the history of 20th-century Modernism’s particular place within theenvironment of German culture as a whole. There are great opportunities for furtherwork that address these issues, some of which may take their lead from the most

interesting recent work in German literary theory, in particular studies that locatemajor post-war Modernist writers such as Paul Celan and Heiner Muller within a

broader German language context of cultural practice.

Dialectic

A predominantly dialectic mode of highly focused thinking about widerphilosophical and aesthetic problems is, of course, one of the strongest features ofmuch German thought since the Aufklarung of the 18th century. It is strongly present

in the philosophical Idealism of both Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte andreaches its most consistent application in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

Hegel, whose fundamental dialectical model—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—whenstripped of the elaborate conceptual superstructure of Hegel’s real practice, forms a

classical 19th-century definition of the process.It has frequently been pointed out that this model is of relevance in

understanding a number of important late 18th- and 19th-century modes of tonalmusical discourse: most obviously in the development and exploitation of the

Classical sonata principle.Despite Marx’s celebrated ‘inversion’ of the dialectic, the Hegelian model is

absolutely central in methodological terms to Marx’s own critique and has from there

informed the majority of later Marxist social and aesthetic analysis. This Hegelian/Marxist tradition has had profound consequences on other later European

philosophers, particularly those advocating forms of political or other socialengagement such as Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even

the determined anti-humanism of Althusser, or those whose concern with mappingand challenging the interfaces between language, knowledge and social practice, such

as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, has led them into a wide-scale rejection ofmuch earlier philosophical methodology.

This dialectic predisposition is central to the work of Theodor W. Adorno, whose

negative dialectics introduces a new strongly emotive tone into his social analysis andcritique conditioned by the wider political circumstances of the time. This is also

broadly true of the work of the other members of the Frankfurt School as a whole.(Attempts to move away from the dialectical process are relatively uncommon in

19th- and early 20th-century German philosophy. Much of the originality in thework of both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche stems from their

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struggles to free themselves from the toils of dialectic. In the 20th century, the

conceptual and linguistic challenges of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenologicalontology reveal the profound effort involved in addressing certain philosophical

issues in a non-dialectic way.)Lachenmann’s chosen reference points in his written discussions of his own work,

in particular Adorno, Lukacs, et al., are themselves reflective of a complex ofsignificant issues in the composer’s own process of aesthetic self-definition—while itis obviously the case that the writings of both Adorno and Lukacs have, at different

times, played a hugely influential formative role in the aesthetic horizons of musicand the other arts in Germany, it would be very difficult to argue that Lachenmann’s

own work exemplifies their views of an appropriate artistic response to the variedphenomena of late capitalist society! There are other more recent aestheticians and

theorists of the arts to whom Lachenmann could refer instead in the discussion of hisown work and whose ideas are more closely related to the acoustic realities of his

scores.However, Lachenmann’s references to these authors do reveal a consistent and

abiding engagement with a variety of forms of dialectic thought, as do his frequent

references to dialectics in various programme notes and published conversations,which is one of the most important areas for consideration in any investigation into

the musical processes that produce the formal structures of his work and into thesubtle and varied relationships between these structures and the actual experienced

musical content that inhabits them.Many of Lachenmann’s most significant and (belatedly) influential scores,

especially from the profoundly questioning and experimental 20-year period betweenthe early 1960s and the early 1980s reveal a clearly (and deliberately) audible surface

exploration of the possibilities of large-scale dialectic-based formal construction; not,of course, in any nostalgically doomed attempt to reinvent the earlier relationshipsbetween dialectic and various tonal practices, but rather because of an appreciation of

the constructive and formal possibilities inherent within dialectical processesthemselves. These processes, with their characteristic potential for juxtaposition,

opposition and combination/synthesis between different materials, which in turnpave the way for future development as the contradictions inherent in this process are

themselves addressed, would be particularly attractive to a composer working with anenormously expanded, non-studio-produced, range of acoustic material (such as

Lachenmann), and they offer opportunities that would be of considerably less interestin a more pitch-based compositional approach.

It could be argued that Lachenmann is one of the first composers of his generation

to re-engage creatively with contemporary parallel developments in the under-standing of dialectical processes as a way of articulating large-scale musical forms.

One of the benefits of this re-engagement is that it has allowed the composer to writein his preferred single movement structures, many of which are extremely long, often

lasting in excess of 30 minutes. Single movements of this length, although highlytypical of Lachenmann, are relatively uncommon in European post-war music and

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they place enormous demands on a composer’s abilities of long-term musical

planning, pacing, deployment of textural variety, etc.In this respect, his work marks a profound shift away from the very different range

of approaches to formal considerations adopted by many of the leading figures of theEuropean avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s—for example, any obvious

indebtedness to dialectical models largely disappears from Pierre Boulez’s work afterthe Deuxieme Sonate (1946 – 1948), apart from the fascinating but somewhatexceptional (and unresolved) case of Figures—Doubles—Prismes (1958 – ), nor do

they play any significant part in Stockhausen’s compositional practice during the1950s.

In Lachenmann’s work, these dialectic explorations are often expressed throughthe conflict of binary tensions between differing forms of acoustic phenomena, as in

Wiegenmusik (1963), where the tensions between the performer’s gestures and ouracoustic perception, and between sonic decay and silence, which are so characteristic

of many of Lachenmann’s most moving scores, finds an especially touching earlyappearance, or in the monumental Klangschatten—mein Saitenspiel (1972), where thecomposer has referred to the work ‘relying on the dialectics of refusal and offer’.1 This

could even be seen in the more recent Mouvement (—vor der Erstarrung) (1982 –1984), where the composer seems to be reappraising many of the structural principles

of these earlier scores in the radically sped-up context typical of a number of hisworks from the mid-/late 1980s and early 1990s. Lachenmann also explores the

inherent tensions between expectation and fulfilment of listeners’ preconceptions, asin Kontrakadenz (1970 – 1971), or through the juxtaposition of several oppositional

pairs of different types of acoustic phenomena or performance activity, as in Salut furCaudwell (1977), an especially remarkable work that is in numerous ways

paradigmatic of many aspects of Lachenmann’s formal practice during this period.Although the dialectic processes are at least partially audible in these works, it

should not be forgotten that, as in any complex musical structure, there are many

different processes unfolding during the work’s duration and differentiated structurallayers that develop these processes in their own characteristic way and at their own

characteristic pace. In an analytical programme note, Lachenmann himself hasreferred to the ‘multilayered process of experimenting with superimposed

arrangements. . .’ 2 in Interieur 1 (1965 – 1966). The extraordinarily rich surfaces ofLachenmann’s best work, with their often very rapid alternations of textures and

playing techniques, which form pairs or groups in dialectic opposition to oneanother, are the surface indicators of other more deeply buried developments. Futureanalysis will clarify these different structural layers more fully.

In other scores of the period, however, this dialectic mode of formal developmentis less clearly audible, less near the music’s surface of perceivable musical events. In a

number of large-scale orchestral and chamber works such as Air (1968 – 1969), theremarkably inwardly probing Dal niente (Interieur III) (1970) and the epic

Schwankungen am Rand (1974 – 1975), the formative tensions seem far moreinteriorised, buried deeper beneath the skin of the music. As these works force their

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listeners to reinterpret the expressive tensions between their expectations and the

performed reality of the score in new ways that radically challenge those preconceivedexpectations, it is particularly aesthetically appropriate that the formative structures

of the pieces should be more withdrawn and hidden from the listeners’ experience ofthe music. It is also significant that in these scores Lachenmann greatly increases the

important role played by sounds on the very periphery of silence and by silence itselfin his music: indeed, it may be suggested that silence, which has always played ahighly suggestive and poignant expressive effect in his work, becomes in these pieces a

major term in the dialectic process itself—as well as fulfilling its traditional roles ofbuilding tension through delay, and offering an expressive alternative to sound,

silence here takes on a formative role in the unfolding musical discourse, one towhich the musical material is itself an ongoing response.

This is not to say that these pieces are in any way less preoccupied with exploringthe possibilities of dialectical structures. Rather, it could be suggested that they reflect

a creative awareness and consequent exploration of different possibilities within abroader constellation of dialectic models, some of which would have been newlyopened to artists in the wake of a number of recently published philosophical works

of the mid-/late 1960s.

Different Dialectic Models

In any ongoing history of dialectical thought, possibly the most important of thesedevelopments would be the papers collected together and published as Pour Marx

in 1965 (translated into English as For Marx, 1969) by Louis Althusser. The impactof this seminal volume was further consolidated with the publication in 1968 of

Althusser’s most sustained critical text, Lire le Capital. Many of the most strikinginnovations in Althusser’s analysis quickly triggered further creative responses byother younger writers; for example, the publication of Guy Debord’s La societe du

spectacle and Jacques Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la difference, both in 1967, clearly showthe impact of Althusser’s new approach. Although strictly confined in their scope to

a number of issues of concern within the sphere of European Marxism at the time,such as the relationship between Marx’s early and mature thought, his debt to

Ludwig Feuerbach and the scientific status of Marxist critique, Althusser’sextraordinarily rigorous rereading of Marx’s work effectively challenged many of

the most long-held humanist perceptions of Marx’s work current amongst westernMarxists.

Central to Althusser’s reinterpretation of Marx’s significance was his under-

standing of how the dialectic processes changed in Marx’s thought, from the earlywork, which is clearly indebted to the methods of Hegel (in a negative sense), Bauer

and the other Right Hegelians, and Feuerbach, to something radically new in themature volumes of Das Kapital and some of the other late polemic texts—a transition

for which Althusser adapted Gaston Bachelard’s usage and referred to as an‘epistemological break’ (Althusser, 1996, p. 168). Althusser also argued that Marx

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himself may have been only partially aware of the nature of this break in his thought,

which would help us in understanding why he found it so difficult to accommodatehis analysis of Capitalist development within the language and conceptual framework

that he had inherited from earlier social theorists and Classical economists.In Althusser’s reading of the dialectic in Marx’s work, he stressed that in the early

texts, which operate within the horizons of Hegelian and immediately post-Hegeliandialectic, the analysis is very tightly focused and the links between the object underdiscussion and the dialectic process of the discussion itself are clear and directly

located within the text—the object’s problematic directly fuels the ensuing structureof reasoning. In the later, mature texts, most significantly in some passages of the

Grundrisse, Das Kapital and the very late Critique of the Gotha Programme, this clearlinkage between object and dialectic is no longer so apparent; the object becomes

removed from the central focus of the dialectic. Tellingly, in the two most importantmethodological essays in For Marx—‘ Contradiction and overdetermination’ and ‘On

the materialist dialectic’ (Althusser, 1996, pp. 87 – 128, 161 – 218)—Althusserdescribes this new model as one where the dialectic object moves from its centralfocus and becomes peripheral. Thus the enormous quantity of factual information,

statistics, analysis, and intricate dialectic reasoning that makes up so much of DasKapital is largely driven by concerns that are not directly expressed within the text

itself. Althusser suggests that a good analogy of this process of peripheralisation is theway that Freudian theory emphasises how subconscious drives, of which the

analysand is himself unaware, can cause changes in (apparently unrelated) forms ofbehaviour.

This essentially new model of a periphalised dialectic structure, driven by concernsthat may not be readily apparent within the actual text itself, seems to offer strong

parallels with the formal practices explored by Lachenmann in a number of his mostimportant scores. The shift in the position of the object of discussion in the dialecticfrom a central, tightly focused and privileged location, to a peripheral, marginal (or

even non-present) position highlighted by Althusser seems to be a remarkablypertinent description of the formal processes in many of Lachenmann’s most

complex and mysterious works. In addition to the major scores from the period1960 – 1980 discussed above, this model further offers potential for the study of many

of Lachenmann’s more recent pieces by suggested access points into the formalthinking of such profoundly significant large-scale works as Ausklang (1984 – 1985,

rev. 1986), Allegro sostenuto (1986 – 1988, rev. 1989), the II. Streichquartett, ‘Reigenseliger Geister’ (1989), and ‘... . .zwei Gefuhle. . ...’, Musik mit Leonardo (1991 – 1992).

Future Avenues

In this text, I have outlined a number of possible avenues for future discussion andfurther research that I consider would be useful in developing our understanding of

the formal aspects of Lachenmann’s work. A greater awareness of and responsivenessto these issues, and of the ways in which different dialectic strategies could aid in

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expanding our aesthetic and analytical knowledge, would assist in the process of

evolving new analytical approaches to important areas of the European post-warrepertoire. Such a developing understanding would also be of benefit in establishing a

methodological framework for discussing formal aspects in the work of a number ofother major German composers, for example Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Hans-

Joachim Hespos and Mathias Spahlinger, whose full importance is only graduallybecoming appreciated by the wider musical community.

Notes

[1] Lachenmann, booklet text, Kontrakadenz; Klangschatten—mein Saitenspiel; Fassade. Kairos:1223.

[2] Drynda, Yvonne, booklet text, Col Legno: WWE 20511.

References

Althusser, L. (1996). For Marx (B. Brewster, Trans.). London: Verso.Lachenmann, H. (1996). Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. Schriften 1966 – 1995 (J. Hausler, Ed.).

Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel.

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