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seliger Geister')
Helmut Lachenmann
Published online: 15 Sep 2010.
To cite this article: Helmut Lachenmann (2004) On My Second String Quartet ('Reigen seliger
1
To speak about a piece, for me, means to describe the concept of material evidenced
therein and to explicate the relationships in which it stands and by which it denes
itself. The transcendental aspect of the piecethat is, its aesthetic and poetic force
(Stringenz)is not forgotten; its signicance comes through in all of these
observations. With all of the bias, incompletionthat is, imperfectionto approach
it differently is to lose oneself in words.
My rst string quartet, Gran Torso, was written 19 years before Reigen.3 My
conception of a musique concre`te instrumentalein which categories are primarily
delineated not by the usual parameters, but rather through the (always differently
deployed) bodily energetic (korperlich-energetischen) aspects of their foregrounding
of sound or of noise (Gerausch)had in Gran Torso to confront for the rst time
such a traditionally comprised sound apparatus (Klangapparat) as the string
quartet, which has become almost forbidden by its very familiarity. In the earlier
orchestral works Air and Kontrakadenz,4 the standard instrumental paradigm was
distorted in terms of sonic realism through the backdoor of expanded percussion
and additional ad hoc instruments: switches whipped through the air, snapped
branches, rattling electronic alarm bells in Airradio broadcasts, water sloshing in
resonant basins, noisily rubbed polystyrene in Kontrakadenz ultimately simplied
the necessary examination of hearing itself; they did not reach the summit,
admittedly, but they showed the way, they helped aim the antennae and made a
number of things more plausible.
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0749445042000285681
60
In Gran Torso, there were no such backdoors. The received playing style itself
had to be expanded, rendered alien. The habits of hearing and performance implied
by my chosen ensemble (Instrumentarium) created a resistancetheir resistance
to my initial ideas about poetics and sound syntax. But this was fruitful and my
visions became keener, more precise and more varied, as did my compositional
means. Tone and noise were not opposites, but rather served as variants of broader
sound categories brought to the fore in ever-varying ways. (Witness, for example,
toneless string noise as the clear product of tremolo bowing, transformed by
extreme slowness, that shifts over the strings all the way onto the bridge; or the
legno battuto on stopped strings: here as a means of the pianississimo articulation of
silence, there as an impulse-variant of pizzicato and other short attacks, as the
product of vertical strikes of the bow against the string, mediated with other,
springing, thrown, wiping, stroking forms of bow movement, denable as
characteristic noises, but also as precise pitches in an appropriately different
context.) And as in the previously written cello study Pression,5 the polyvalently
expressed energetic aspect ultimately thematized itself. Everything was sparked by
its development (Durchfuhrung).
When I conceived Reigen in 1988/1989, it was clear to me that every innovative
push that Gran Torso represented (at least for me) had set a standard against which
the new engagement with this ensemble (Besetzung) must measure itself. I could, in
composing, neither simply make use of the earlier, already-developed means, nor
could I abandon the terrain that I had conquered. It came down to how to proceed
from there and this meant: to go deeper andwith an outlook, as always, changed
in the meantimeto see into the already-developed landscape more keenly. (This
also entailednot only in Reigenthe recollection of things previously excluded, the
reconciliation with the temporarily obsolete: with melodically, rhythmically and
harmonically dened, even consonant elementsa reconciliation that could not be
called a retreat into a pre-critical (vorkritischen) state, but had rather to signify
forward-looking integration on a somehow resulting path.)
In fact, the sonic landscapes developed in Gran Torso opened themselves even
wider in Reigen, both inward and outward.
In terms of sound technique, the workas a eld of categories completing and at
the same time transforming itself poco a pocoemerges rst through autato
gestures, while the mapped-out sound world gradually transforms itself into a
diametrically opposed landscape of quite differently structured pizzicato elds. (I
borrow the indication autato from Luigi Nonos Varianti, although its meaning and
performance in his and my case do not overlap 100 per cent.)
The autato technique itself, in its absolutely basic form, is not only dened here
through the relatively quick, light breathing bowstroke on a string loosely held in a
muting grip (Dampfgriff): there is also the simultaneous movement of the drawn
bow between the bridge (at the frog of the bow) and the damping nger (at the tip).
On the cello it is naturally reversed: movement between the bridge with the tip and
the ngerboard (specically, the damping nger) with the frog. (The sound of
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The temporary drowning of pitch in toneless string noise on the bridge allows a
hidden variation of the ngering so that, when the bow returns to the strings, the
autato sound resumes with pitches different from the ones it had when it was
subsumed.
Such disappearances and modied returns are achieved in Reigen through gures
that can somewhat recklessly be called trill variants.
These are exercised and exorcised through a wide variety of distortions: one
could say that they propel the piece onward from the opening. Their most lavish
variants appear as fast gures in an ordinario-bowed tutti texture that draws (real and
imitated) overtone-glissando gures out of a polytonal eld, and from there into
tonelessness (see the score, mm. 85 112).
That tutti texture can be brought, through synchronized dynamics and shared bow
movements, onto the bridge and back onto the strings, from disappearance into
tonelessness back into re-emergence in the same way as the simple autato sound:
what takes place in a single instrumental voice can be transferred to the whole
instrumental apparatus (see Figure 3).
Again and again in the course of the overall processes of the piece, we nd
ourselves involved with a single, almost homophonically treated 16-stringed sonic
mechanism (Klang-Gerat).
Its further instantiations:
.
Figure 2 Cello part, II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 6, mm. 26 28. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
Figure 3 II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 18, mm. 99 102. # 1989, Breitkopf
& Hartel, Wiesbaden.
64
Not least, the formation of such an imaginary super-instrument (SuperInstrument) from its component simple sound forms and playing techniques
helped the compositional process to the diversication and dialectical redenition
of what appears at rst to be a purely physically oriented sonic correspondence
(physikalisch orientierten Klangzusammenhang), of which a speculative idea of
abstract or concrete formhowever cleverwould not itself be capable, and
without which the orientation of concrete sounds into a botanized presentation
would be ruined.
Also among the functions of the super-instrument is the hocket-like formation
of sequences out of mutually cooperative single entries of a few or all of the
Figure 5 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 30, m. 169. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
Figure 6 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 32, mm. 177 180. #
1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
66
Figure 7 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 23, m. 124. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
Figure 8 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 26, mm. 143 144. #
1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
Figure 9 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, pp. 32 33, mm. 183
184. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
Figure 10 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, pp. 38 39, mm. 221
224. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
68
Figure 11 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, pp. 40 43, 48, mm. (a)
231, (b) 239, (c) 245, (d) 236, (e) 280, (f) 246, (g) 241. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel,
Wiesbaden.
Figure 12 (a) Strings stopped at a distance of a minor sixth, or consonant stops. (b)
Natural-harmonic nger pressure (second and third overtones). (c) Random harmonics,
as resonant as possible, through ad libitum touching (relying on luck) and rhythmicized
release of the strings in the area above the fourth partial. (d) Stopping unidentiable
pitches through tearing right at the bridge. (e) Tight grip, as high as possible. (f) Strings
behind the bridge. (g) Open strings. Note: The dotted brackets around the violin clef refer
to the extreme scordatura, which permits, despite the precise notation of the ngering,
no exact denition of the resulting pitches.
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Figure 13 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 47, m. 274. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
tremolo), and so on overlay each other and work together. They thus t into the timearticulating (zeitartikulierenden) particulars of a net8 previously generated for the
entire work: a net of extremely aperiodic pulses, traveling alongside as if from
underground, the measurements of the whole pre-compositionally regulated, that in
the score is notated above the instrumental parts as a rhythmic frame. (The pitches
notated there, which owe themselves to easily traced 12-tone permutations, exist
simply for a possible verication of the generating principle. Musically, they play no
role.)
The sonic events placed in this net, however, become unwieldy in the course
of the piece. Their internal rhythmic structure rips out their stitches as if from
within. And where that hocket sequence forms, crystallizing entirely into a plastic
rhythm, the net has nally become almost totally nonfunctional; it demarcates only
general temporal areas. For that reason, from measure 280ff. of the score, its
presentation along the upper staff is abandoned. Instead, in that space appears
merely the total rhythm resulting from the complementary cooperation of the
played gestures. They crystallize temporarily into a quasi-Waltz (mm. 240 241).
These rhythmic gestures, further expanded, nally form in the epilogue the latent
temporal skeleton for the end of the piece: the internal rhythm has therefore
become the structural net: regression toward the close, which originates at the
beginning. . . (Figure 15).
Just such a simplication of the structural construction can be discerned as an
(intermediary) product of a perpetual spatial idea of time, in which events occur
successively and are homogeneously constructed to merge melodically and
rhythmically, but nally form not a succession but a mutually completing attraction:
an arpeggio in an imaginary universal sound/space/eld [Gesamt-Klang/GesamtRaum/Gesamt-Feld], branching out on various scales. (In such pieces as Ein
Kinderspiel 9 and Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied,10 above all in the Siciliano of the
latter, there exists a relative of this type of structure, reduced in complexity, which
through that reduction has been given room for the aura11 of the soundsthus
bringing more intricate complexitiese.g. quoted materialsinto play.)
Figure 14 II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, pp. 58 59, mm. 344 351. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
72
Figure 15 II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, pp. 52 53, mm. 303 314. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
74
Figure 16a II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 1, mm. 1 5. # 1989, Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
76
Figure 16a II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 1, mm. 1 5. # 1989, Breitkopf &
rtel, 16b
Ha
Figure
Wiesbaden.
Pitch structure at the opening.
Figure 18 Reduction of II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 37, m. 210. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
From measure 296, the music, the touched-upon sounds always differently ltered,
bangs its head against the wall of this scordatura.
But by itself, the strike of a st against the keyboard of a well-tempered keyboard
can produce nothing but diatonic or pentatonic clusters. And one can hiss as
violently as one likes into a harmonica: nothing will emerge but a pre-programmed C
major triad.
From this point in Reigen, the established pitch frameworks (Tonhohen-Rahmen)
renew themselves through the extreme scordatura set up in the course of
performance. Each player has here a different, freely determined time to detune
the strings of his instrument wildly, i.e. by no particular distance, by which means
each string will be assigned a different interval, so that from here as few fthrelationships as possible lie behind the music.
Then, on this no longer controllable gamut of 16 hopelessly detuned strings
transformed by arco con sordinothe Epilogue takes its course. Of all the
reminiscences that it celebrates under varying conditions (among which the sloweddown tremolo movement sends a greeting in the direction of Gran Torso), the
evocation of the originally so delicately produced autato undergoes the most
conspicuous transformation: since the obligatory bow motion between bridge and
ngerboard described at the beginning is now performed with pressed bow, the noise
components brightness changes, which came through subtly, at most, beforehand,
here come to light as gently rattling pitch glissandi: downwardly or upwardly directed,
based on whether the damping grip stops the deepened and thus drowned-out area of
the strings or not (Figure 20).
Measure 374, which consists of alternating, overlapping downward glissandi in the
two violins, can be repeated ad libitum, theoretically ad innitum. It is the point that
is reached somewhere in almost all of my compositions, sometimes more than once:
where the music pausesin a sounding fermataand an ostinato passage either
loses or nds itself before it continues. It is the moment in mountain climbing
where one takes a deep breath and surveys the horizon: its intensity is unexplainable
without the effort leading up to it. The dynamic time of this traversal (Begehens) is
something different from the static, timeless time of the traversed landscape itself.
These two times interpenetrate: music in search of non-music. But not a magic that
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Figure 20 II. Streichquartett, Reigen seliger Geister, p. 62, mm. 366 371. # 1989,
Breitkopf & Hartel, Wiesbaden.
seeks to master perception, rather an open space that takes it captive, in order to
show it where it has freed itselfwhere it may free itself.
Notes
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Reference
Lachenmann, H. (1996). Commentary on the Zweites Streichquartett (Reigen seliger Geister)
(1989). In J. Hausler (Ed.), Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. Schriften 1966 1995 (p. 399).
Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel.