Dilettante Music

"With my 'noises' I could not and cannot forget the 'fear,' that is, the tension between the taboos of the concert hall and extra-territorial excursions. On the contrary -- the expressive power of my music derives from...precisely this tension."

There are, admittedly, quite a few "funny noises" in temA, Helmut Lachenmann's 1968 work for voice, cello, and flute: the cellist often presses the bow into the strings so hard that they emit a fierce ripping sound; the flautist overblows and blusters; the soprano breathes (slowly), gasps, snorts, and at one point lets out a blood-curdling scream.

In much "extended-technique" music of the time -- this stuff was particularly the rage in the later '60s -- the impression is often of a funfare of "new" sounds, innocent of their own newness. Lachenmann's aesthetics, however, were never so innocent: his "new sounds" arose out of direct confrontations with the old. "Music" was not something the composer strove to make, but, rather, something he struggled against: the "cooked" tradition is his "raw" material, and his vision was in the process a magical inversion of what we understand the tradition to be -- technology in the service, under the jurisdiction, of expression. In a work like temA, perhaps Lachenmann's first avant-garde piece, we instead hear a strange and estranged "expression of technology itself," in which the instruments (including the voice, here dealt with in a provocatively ambivalent way) are revealed through their sounds, rather than the sounds revealed through their instrument. And yet, through this methodically disorienting breed of composition, which seems to practice a kind of resonant, unfolding acoustic sculpture more than a writing of music, the force beneath the physical matter, the ghost in the machine, shakes itself into resonant being. Thus we hear the flute huffing away, or humming through the instrument, and are immediately knocked out of pre-packaged sound that seems to come out of the sky (or from our equalizer-augmented car stereo speakers); similarly, the voice of the soprano becomes a colorful background rather the "object itself" -- that role is instead the whole body's now, a body which breathes, chokes, snorts, sighs, whose pulse and anxiety (indeed, whose very nerves) have suddenly been mapped onto the soundstage.

The result is only superficially the "alienation" which so many commentators slap as a label on the effect of Lachenmann's music; what the listener actually experiences is an uncanny new kind of intimacy, which in its presentation, not just of sounds, but especially of the "conditions of their creation," erases the line between "us and them." Suddenly we're aware that the players are breathing, just as we are, and that perhaps the music is breathing as well -- all of us are sharing the same air, this marvelous connective tissue whose universal continuity is otherwise so grievously ignored. Perhaps this is Lachenmann's central motivation for calling the piece temA (the stifled form of "Atem," German for "breath"), and for highlighting one of the soprano's only recognizable words -- "Luft," German for "air." ~ All Music Guide