Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 91 – 95

The Theory of Perception in the

Aesthetic Conception of Helmut
Lachenmann: A ‘Redefinition’ Trial of
the ‘Functional’ Aspect of Music
Iyad Mohammad

In this article, I discuss my opinions of Helmut Lachenmann’s own theories on perception

and the functionality of music. I also allude to the numerous ways in which his music
could be approached by new or experienced listeners and how Helmut’s musical thought
has evolved during the past few decades.

Keywords: Functionality; Listening; Perception

One of the main keys to understanding the works of the contemporary German
composer Helmut Lachenmann is his concept of musical perception, in which he
develops a new type of music listening, a new approach to the essence of this art and
its functions in modern society. Working out a new attitude of man toward music is
an issue that is central to some of Lachenmann’s most celebrated essays. Wholly
dedicated to this subject are such articles as ‘Vier Grundbestimmungen des
Musikhörens’ (‘Four fundamental provisions for listening’, 1979), ‘Hören ist
wehrlos—ohne Hören. Über Möglichkeiten und Schwierigkeiten’ (‘Listening is
defenceless without listening. On possibilities and difficulties’, 1985) and ‘Her-
ausforderungen an das Hören (Gespräch mit Reinhold Urmetzer)’ (‘The challenges of
listening [conversation with Reinhold Urmetzer]’, 1991), all of which appear in the
1996 collection of Lachenmann’s writings, Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. In his
articles the composer strives for an innovative conception of listening that embodies
the existential idea of acting out of knowledge and, as such, differs from the
traditional understanding of listening as a passive act of perception. According to
Lachenmann, listening is a process of perception, in which the composer, as well as
the performer and listener, touches his way through the musical material together
with the factors predetermining its tonal, corporal, structural and associative

ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) ª 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0749446042000285708
92 I. Mohammad
contexts, at the same time opposing himself to the latter. While in this process of
recognising the factors that predetermine the character of the musical material, the
listener becomes aware of his own predetermination, of the inner factors that
predetermine his act of perception itself and thus limit the range (scope) of his
apprehension and experiencing of earlier unknown musical events. To listen, writes
Lachenmann (1996, pp. 117 – 118),

means to discover one’s own ability to change and to oppose it against the just
recognised non-freedom as a resistance; to listen means to rediscover oneself,
means to change oneself. . .. It is a question of a new, a changed perception.

The musical work is understood as a

landscape, through which we are to touch our way in the process of listening. In it
we recognise our own predetermined structure of perception as sublimed, as
broken-up and as possible too; maybe only in this regained freedom can we be
reconciled with it (our predetermined structure) without yielding to it anew.
(Lachenmann, 1996, p. 135)

What has been called here the process of ‘touching one’s way through’ the musical
material is what Lachenmann names in German abtasten, one of the main
compositional categories of the composer’s aesthetics. It indicates both the cognitive
and physical aspects of the process. The word awakens the image of a blind man
trying to construct in his mind a view—a picture of the world around him without
being able to really see it—only by using the sense of touch. One might even be
reminded of Maurice Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles. Hearing, performing and
composing become processes of ‘touching the way through’ the offered and given
musical material, through the composition and through the structures and relations
existing in it. Thus they are described as acts of searching and exploration, as
cognition.
The material side of this ‘touching’ is on one hand closely related to the purely
physical and acoustic features of the musical material, named by the composer in
‘Vier Grundbestimmungen des Musikhörens’ as corporeality (Körperlichkeit)
(Lachenmann, 1996, p. 58). This term, defined in his later article ‘Zum Problem
des Strukturalismus’ (‘On the problem of structuralism’, 1990) as the ‘acoustic-
physical experience’ (Lachenmann, 1996, p. 88), generalises in its turn the acoustic
experience of Lachenmann’s classification of sound-types made in his early article
‘Klangtypen der Neuen Musik’ (‘Sound types of New Music’, 1966). On the other
hand, it is not less related to the extremely material, physical attitude of Lachenmann
toward musical instruments that materialises in his unique world of sound referred to
by him as musique concrète instrumentale.
No less determined by Lachenmann’s material approach to musical categories is
the cognitive aspect of touching. The choice of the word abtasten itself is very
significant. The direct material impression it gives and the sensuality it attributes to
 Contemporary Music Review 93
the cognitive process characterise the latter as an empirical existential act. It excludes
any abstract, speculative or metaphysical interpretations. This act of exploration
concerns not only the musical material of a work. Instead, it is a much more general
attitude that manifests itself with regard to what Lachenmann calls the ‘aesthetic
apparatus’: musical instruments (in relation to their absolute physical-acoustic
possibilities) and the history of music as a whole, through which the composer
‘touches his way’ as part of his present existence, as far as it is a searching one.
According to Lachenmann (1996, p. 63), the transformation of the act of
perception occurs due to the fact that ‘the confrontation with the musical material
turns by necessity into a confrontation with oneself’, also with one’s own perception
and its cognitive structure. This opposition of perception with the ego itself is
unavoidable if listening is to become an existential experience, in which the aim of
cognition is self-knowledge and self-consciousness. When listening is understood as
an existential act, it becomes aware of its own structure, it focuses on itself as a
process. Thus, the final aim of such an approach becomes the experiencing of the
conditions and circumstances of perception in the course of perception itself. The
result of such a reflective listening would be the self-experiencing of man in the
course of the cognitive act. ‘Practically,’ as Lachenmann (1996, p. 118) puts it, ‘such
listening means concentration of the spirit, work. But work, which as the
experiencing of penetration into reality, as progressing self-experiencing, is a happy
experience.’
This reasoning brings Lachenmann to a rather paradoxical assertion concerning
the essence of music as an art. The object of music, as he sees it, is the act of ‘listening
itself, the self-perceiving perception’ (Lachenmann, 1996, p. 117). Music thus loses its
traditional meaning as the most consequent example of art for the sake of art. Its
function is to activate a conscious reflective process. It is a means, the final aim of
which is for man to experience himself, his own cognitive act and structure.
Listening, traditionally traced as a passive act, here becomes an active self-
experiencing of man, an exploration of his existential situation. Thus, what really
matters in a composition is not what happens, but rather how it happens, not what
we hear, but how we hear it and how we experience what we hear. A certain musical
acoustic event works as a catalyst, a generator within the frame of a new form of
listening, in which feeling and thinking while listening to music is recognised as a
necessary means for a conscious self-observation. The differentiation in Lachen-
mann’s terminology between feeling and experiencing is based on the understanding
of the first as an elementary and rather passive act of self-identification, while the
second is defined as an existential process of man experiencing himself in action, a
self-experiencing apprehension.
In this correlation between the what and the how in the act of perception we
observe a resemblance with the relation of the same two aspects of a musical
composition. The concept of musical form as a ‘description of the flowing of time’,
popular in the second half of the 20th century, is strongly interrelated with the
processes found in Lachenmann’s works. This concept is based on a more descriptive
94 I. Mohammad
function of musical form, rather than the traditional constructive one. The music of
Lachenmann is one of gradually unfolding structural and acoustic processes. Each of
the innovative acoustic and technical elements for which Lachenmann’s music has
come to be famous is not as important in itself as its context within a compositional
process, whether acoustic or technical. The what of the musical event is subordinated
to its how, to the issue of organisation of the material in time. The qualitative aspect
of the musical material is what is organised and developed in the musical process; it is
the manifestation of the latter.
This analogy between the relation of the qualitative aspect and the overall process
of the act of perception on the one hand and the musical material and compositional
technique on the other is related to the basic structural orientation of Lachenmann’s
thinking.

As structural experience hearing is orientated not only positively toward the

qualitative aspects of the acoustic object, but explores the position of this object in
its surrounding. The perception of music becomes narrower or wider simulta-
neously with these interrelations, unfolding themselves in time and space between
it and the nearer and farther surrounding. (Lachenmann, 1996, p. 118)

To say it in another way: ‘hearing apprehends consciously and unconsciously,

together with the acoustic events, also relations’ (Lachenmann, 1996, p. 118).
Lachenmann interprets structures as a ‘polyphony of allocations’ that must be
explored in the process of listening and experienced as an expressive and structural-
acoustic idea. Such a type of listening the composer calls ‘structurally orientated
listening’. The terminology is clearly close to the conception of the Russian
musicologist Boris Asafiev of a ‘musical form directed toward perception’.
However, Asafiev’s ideas are quite the opposite of Lachenmann’s: they interpret
perception as the passive side of the act of listening and see musical form as its
active one.
Structure and process, or said better as the structure of the musical process, is one
of the most important categories of the compositional thinking of Lachenmann and
as such is common to both acts of composition and perception. In experiencing a
composition, in experiencing the act of perception itself as a structured process, man
becomes aware of his own alienation. As Lachenmann (1996, p. 66) puts it: ‘The
expressive ego is struck by its own socialisation; the subject discovers himself as an
object, a given entity, a structure.’ In the subject experiencing himself as a structure,
he achieves the ultimate unity of the musical structural process of a composition and
the perceiving subject for which Lachenmann strives.
Thus, in Lachenmann’s musical aesthetics and his theory of perception, the acts of
listening, composing and performing are brought closer together on the basis of the
similarity of their essence and role in human existence. The perception of music
becomes in his writings an existential act of self-knowledge, the object of which is
man himself, his structure and relationship with his surrounding. As in the
composer’s music, in his theoretical writings human action and its reflection are
 Contemporary Music Review 95
traced as self-sufficient aspects of human existence—a fact that reflects the existential
orientation of Lachenmann’s views and thinking.

Reference
Lachenmann, H. (1996). Musik als existentielle Erfahrung. Schriften 1966 – 1995 (J. Häusler, Ed.).
Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel.