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Helmut Lachenmann: Concertini

für Ensemble

(2005)

Work titles, not unlike introductions to works, mislead at best. »Concertini« promises a collection of »concertante« situations, but fulfills such expectation in an irritating way at best.
Certainly there are soloistic situations: for guitar, harp, tuba, etc., even for concertante string septet (with a borrowing from my recent string quartet »Grido«), but also, less plausibly, forsit venia this awful verbo»cross-instrumental« types of action and forms of articulation, such as a »Scharrkonzert«, »solos« for spatial movements, for resonances, sound sequences, rhythmic figures (with a visit to my »Mouvement«, to whose history the story of my friendship with Ensemble Modern is linked), etc.

 

My compositional model of thinking from the sixties, that idea of a »musique concrète instrumentale«, which includes the energetic aspect of the produced sound event, its »corporeality« in the composition process, often even thematizes it, could notif this model wanted to remain alivebe limited to the alienation of the instrumental sound. From the beginning, it has changed and opened up, and has taken hold not only of the »noisy« and alienated, but also of the unalienated, familiar, consonant in the broadest sense: no less than the »noisy«, it includes the rhythmic, the gestural, even the melodic, the intervallic, the harmonic, with the intention of constantly illuminating anew everything that sounds and sounds that move in such a changed context.

 

»Concertante« treatment means that such things as dominating are accompanied, disguised, uncovered, covered up, counterpointed, and however and wherever transformedwhatever happens when reflecting on such ad hoc assembled sound categories: Aberrations, if you will, in the self-developed labyrinth, located in a nevertheless strict time framework: Dowsing in one’s own overgrown garden in search of …

(Helmut Lachenmann, Trarego, June 7, 2005)