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Contemporary Music Review

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Dialectic and Form in the Music of

Helmut Lachenmann
David Lesser
Published 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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Contemporary Music Review

Vol. 23, No. 3/4, September/December 2004, pp. 107 114

Dialectic and Form in the Music of

Helmut Lachenmann

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David 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 Lachenmanns music.
Keywords: Althusser; Analysis; Criticism; Dialectic; Form; History; Marx

Helmut Lachenmanns challenging and uniquely beautiful music offers an extensive

range of intriguing possibilities for analysis, discussion and creative response by other
musicians 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 Lachenmanns work that
have 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 frequently
assumed 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 themselves
particularly 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 access
into their aesthetic, procedural and formal horizons. An important rst step in this
process would be to identify those areas of aesthetic and wider philosophical
implication that have traditionally been undervalued or ignored in much previous
writing 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
Lachenmanns formal thought (an area of enquiry that has been particularly
neglectedindeed some critics have gone as far as to suggest that his work is
essentially formless in any conventionally analysable sense, and for which many of
the current analytical tools that have been developed during the last half century in
ISSN 0749-4467 (print)/ISSN 1477-2256 (online) 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 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. I
will 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 of
articulating large-scale musical forms in many of the composers most signicant
scores. Further, I will also suggest that, to maximise the conceptual benets that this
line of inquiry brings, it is necessary to move beyond the conventional Aristotelian or
19th-century understanding of the nature of the dialectic process itself and examine
Lachenmanns practice in the light of newer dialectic models, in particular those
suggested in the work of Louis Althusser.
Locating Lachenmanns Achievement
Helmut Lachenmanns work poses unique aesthetic challenges for both his listeners
and other composers and performers. Although it is possible to locate his oeuvre
within the developing global context of post-war European Modernism (and this
would in itself be a highly useful cultural exercise), Lachenmann has, in rigorously
developing and exploring his own creative horizons, produced a body of work that
denes itself largely by the aesthetic tensions and paradoxes inherent within this
particular stream of Modernism, and this movements own (much argued)
progressive disintegration during the latter half of the 20th century as a viable
meta-aesthetic. Lachenmanns music, together with his various theoretical and other
miscellaneous writings (collectively published as MaeE; Lachenmann, 1996), are a
source of fascinating potential for exploring these aesthetic tensions that lie at the
heart of so many aspects of European contemporary music.
Lachenmanns work is rmly embedded in its origins within the general
development of European Modernism at a particular stage in its history: it is not
an 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 the
older gure of Bernd Alois Zimmermann (whose late music certainly moves towards
some of the aesthetic and textural regions explored in Lachenmanns contemporary
pieces), but unlike others, notably Karlheinz Stockhausen, Lachenmanns work stems,
in its inception, as opposed to many of its actual sonic characteristics, from the
conicting inuences and pressures particular to the broad trends of Modernism
within the history of German or related German language 19th- and 20th-century art,
culture and social critique. (Any exploration of the actual sonic phenomena of
Lachenmanns mature work would have to be widened to take into account the
crucial inuences of non-German composers such as Harry Partch, Iannis Xenakis
and his teacher Luigi Nono.)
This is in no way an attempt to localise or provincialise Lachenmanns work, nor is
it to suggest that the composer is himself oblivious to other musical developments in

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the rest of the world (again, the inuences of Nono and Partch are highly suggestive).
The traditional myth of Germanic cultural otherness is an extremely problematic
concept 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 and
exploited throughout his career are most clearly to be grasped through a wider
understanding of the history of 20th-century Modernisms particular place within the
environment of German culture as a whole. There are great opportunities for further
work 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 locate
major 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 wider
philosophical and aesthetic problems is, of course, one of the strongest features of
much 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 and
reaches its most consistent application in the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, whose fundamental dialectical modelthesis, antithesis, synthesiswhen
stripped of the elaborate conceptual superstructure of Hegels real practice, forms a
classical 19th-century denition 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 tonal
musical discourse: most obviously in the development and exploitation of the
Classical sonata principle.
Despite Marxs celebrated inversion of the dialectic, the Hegelian model is
absolutely central in methodological terms to Marxs 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 social
engagement such as Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even
the determined anti-humanism of Althusser, or those whose concern with mapping
and challenging the interfaces between language, knowledge and social practice, such
as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, has led them into a wide-scale rejection of
much 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 and
critique 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 the
work of both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche stems from their

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D. Lesser

struggles to free themselves from the toils of dialectic. In the 20th century, the
conceptual and linguistic challenges of Martin Heideggers phenomenological
ontology reveal the profound effort involved in addressing certain philosophical
issues in a non-dialectic way.)
Lachenmanns chosen reference points in his written discussions of his own work,
in particular Adorno, Lukacs, et al., are themselves reective of a complex of
signicant issues in the composers own process of aesthetic self-denitionwhile it
is obviously the case that the writings of both Adorno and Lukacs have, at different
times, played a hugely inuential formative role in the aesthetic horizons of music
and the other arts in Germany, it would be very difcult to argue that Lachenmanns
own work exemplies their views of an appropriate artistic response to the varied
phenomena 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 his
own work and whose ideas are more closely related to the acoustic realities of his
scores.
However, Lachenmanns 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 the
subtle and varied relationships between these structures and the actual experienced
musical content that inhabits them.
Many of Lachenmanns most signicant and (belatedly) inuential scores,
especially from the profoundly questioning and experimental 20-year period between
the 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 relationships
between dialectic and various tonal practices, but rather because of an appreciation of
the constructive and formal possibilities inherent within dialectical processes
themselves. These processes, with their characteristic potential for juxtaposition,
opposition and combination/synthesis between different materials, which in turn
pave the way for future development as the contradictions inherent in this process are
themselves addressed, would be particularly attractive to a composer working with an
enormously expanded, non-studio-produced, range of acoustic material (such as
Lachenmann), and they offer opportunities that would be of considerably less interest
in a more pitch-based compositional approach.
It could be argued that Lachenmann is one of the rst composers of his generation
to re-engage creatively with contemporary parallel developments in the understanding of dialectical processes as a way of articulating large-scale musical forms.
One of the benets of this re-engagement is that it has allowed the composer to write
in his preferred single movement structures, many of which are extremely long, often
lasting in excess of 30 minutes. Single movements of this length, although highly
typical of Lachenmann, are relatively uncommon in European post-war music and

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they place enormous demands on a composers 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 gures of the
European avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960sfor example, any obvious
indebtedness to dialectical models largely disappears from Pierre Boulezs work after
the Deuxie`me Sonate (1946 1948), apart from the fascinating but somewhat
exceptional (and unresolved) case of FiguresDoublesPrismes (1958 ), nor do
they play any signicant part in Stockhausens compositional practice during the
1950s.
In Lachenmanns work, these dialectic explorations are often expressed through
the conict of binary tensions between differing forms of acoustic phenomena, as in
Wiegenmusik (1963), where the tensions between the performers gestures and our
acoustic perception, and between sonic decay and silence, which are so characteristic
of many of Lachenmanns most moving scores, nds an especially touching early
appearance, or in the monumental Klangschattenmein Saitenspiel (1972), where the
composer 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 his
works from the mid-/late 1980s and early 1990s. Lachenmann also explores the
inherent tensions between expectation and fullment of listeners preconceptions, as
in Kontrakadenz (1970 1971), or through the juxtaposition of several oppositional
pairs of different types of acoustic phenomena or performance activity, as in Salut fur
Caudwell (1977), an especially remarkable work that is in numerous ways
paradigmatic of many aspects of Lachenmanns 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 works duration and differentiated structural
layers that develop these processes in their own characteristic way and at their own
characteristic pace. In an analytical programme note, Lachenmann himself has
referred to the multilayered process of experimenting with superimposed
arrangements. . . 2 in Interieur 1 (1965 1966). The extraordinarily rich surfaces of
Lachenmanns best work, with their often very rapid alternations of textures and
playing techniques, which form pairs or groups in dialectic opposition to one
another, are the surface indicators of other more deeply buried developments. Future
analysis will clarify these different structural layers more fully.
In other scores of the period, however, this dialectic mode of formal development
is less clearly audible, less near the musics surface of perceivable musical events. In a
number of large-scale orchestral and chamber works such as Air (1968 1969), the
remarkably inwardly probing Dal niente (Interieur III) (1970) and the epic
Schwankungen am Rand (1974 1975), the formative tensions seem far more
interiorised, 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 preconceived
expectations, it is particularly aesthetically appropriate that the formative structures
of the pieces should be more withdrawn and hidden from the listeners experience of
the music. It is also signicant that in these scores Lachenmann greatly increases the
important role played by sounds on the very periphery of silence and by silence itself
in his music: indeed, it may be suggested that silence, which has always played a
highly suggestive and poignant expressive effect in his work, becomes in these pieces a
major term in the dialectic process itselfas well as fullling its traditional roles of
building tension through delay, and offering an expressive alternative to sound,
silence here takes on a formative role in the unfolding musical discourse, one to
which the musical material is itself an ongoing response.
This is not to say that these pieces are in any way less preoccupied with exploring
the possibilities of dialectical structures. Rather, it could be suggested that they reect
a creative awareness and consequent exploration of different possibilities within a
broader constellation of dialectic models, some of which would have been newly
opened 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 these
developments would be the papers collected together and published as Pour Marx
in 1965 (translated into English as For Marx, 1969) by Louis Althusser. The impact
of this seminal volume was further consolidated with the publication in 1968 of
Althussers most sustained critical text, Lire le Capital. Many of the most striking
innovations in Althussers analysis quickly triggered further creative responses by
other younger writers; for example, the publication of Guy Debords La societe du
spectacle and Jacques Derridas LEcriture et la difference, both in 1967, clearly show
the impact of Althussers new approach. Although strictly conned in their scope to
a number of issues of concern within the sphere of European Marxism at the time,
such as the relationship between Marxs early and mature thought, his debt to
Ludwig Feuerbach and the scientic status of Marxist critique, Althussers
extraordinarily rigorous rereading of Marxs work effectively challenged many of
the most long-held humanist perceptions of Marxs work current amongst western
Marxists.
Central to Althussers reinterpretation of Marxs signicance was his understanding of how the dialectic processes changed in Marxs thought, from the early
work, 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 the
mature volumes of Das Kapital and some of the other late polemic textsa transition
for which Althusser adapted Gaston Bachelards 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 difcult to accommodate
his analysis of Capitalist development within the language and conceptual framework
that he had inherited from earlier social theorists and Classical economists.
In Althussers reading of the dialectic in Marxs work, he stressed that in the early
texts, which operate within the horizons of Hegelian and immediately post-Hegelian
dialectic, the analysis is very tightly focused and the links between the object under
discussion and the dialectic process of the discussion itself are clear and directly
located within the textthe objects problematic directly fuels the ensuing structure
of reasoning. In the later, mature texts, most signicantly in some passages of the
Grundrisse, Das Kapital and the very late Critique of the Gotha Programme, this clear
linkage 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 important
methodological essays in For Marx Contradiction and overdetermination and On
the materialist dialectic (Althusser, 1996, pp. 87 128, 161 218)Althusser
describes this new model as one where the dialectic object moves from its central
focus and becomes peripheral. Thus the enormous quantity of factual information,
statistics, analysis, and intricate dialectic reasoning that makes up so much of Das
Kapital 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 the
way that Freudian theory emphasises how subconscious drives, of which the
analysand is himself unaware, can cause changes in (apparently unrelated) forms of
behaviour.
This essentially new model of a periphalised dialectic structure, driven by concerns
that 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 most
important scores. The shift in the position of the object of discussion in the dialectic
from a central, tightly focused and privileged location, to a peripheral, marginal (or
even non-present) position highlighted by Althusser seems to be a remarkably
pertinent description of the formal processes in many of Lachenmanns most
complex and mysterious works. In addition to the major scores from the period
1960 1980 discussed above, this model further offers potential for the study of many
of Lachenmanns more recent pieces by suggested access points into the formal
thinking of such profoundly signicant large-scale works as Ausklang (1984 1985,
rev. 1986), Allegro sostenuto (1986 1988, rev. 1989), the II. Streichquartett, Reigen
seliger 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 and
further research that I consider would be useful in developing our understanding of
the formal aspects of Lachenmanns work. A greater awareness of and responsiveness
to 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-war
repertoire. Such a developing understanding would also be of benet in establishing a
methodological framework for discussing formal aspects in the work of a number of
other major German composers, for example Bernd Alois Zimmermann, HansJoachim Hespos and Mathias Spahlinger, whose full importance is only gradually
becoming appreciated by the wider musical community.

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Notes
[1] Lachenmann, booklet text, Kontrakadenz; Klangschattenmein 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.