Helmut Lachenmann’s String Quartets… There is no doubt all of them are astonishing pieces of music; radically thought, wonderfully organized, masterly crafted and extremely unique, each of them, separately…
I want to share a video of the first one, a groundbreaking work; Gran Torso (1971/72 - Revised 1978) with a review by music historian Seth Brodsky. I also want to write my own thoughts down and share with you later.
Enjoy!Review:
“The highest revelations of music make us perceive, even involuntarily, the crudity of all imagery…as the last quartets of Beethoven put every perception…the entire realm of empirical reality, to shame…” — Nietzsche
The beginning of Helmut Lachenmann’s towering anti-work Gran Torso begins with sounds we have no vocabulary for: unprepared, we’re bound to think them grievous mistakes from a terribly underprepared ensemble — a clonk of bow-wood against body-wood, an airy breath of bow-hair against bridge, a wrenching scratch-tone gotten by pushing into the string far beyond its ideal pressure. The sounds we’d expect from a string quartet are blocked out entirely, like the black circle of an eclipsed sun. But, like that eclipsed sun, this block releases an astonishing corona of sounds around what we would have heard: vibrant, violent, shocking, these peripheral effects become the actual spectacle. They unfold with a logic and drama that seem completely beyond their promise, and within the first five minutes of this 20-minute work the entire quartet is filling the soundscape with measured scrubbing, screeching, snapping, and squeaking. Even Lachenmann’s most bitter opponents would not deny that, in its knot of savagery, weirdness, and precision, this moment astonishes.
But behind this astonishment in the sounds’ newness — one could call it a first-stage astonishment — the effect extends into something like a second-stage wonder. It seems that despite these sounds being as aggressively far from the “signs of life” we’ve come to savor in the quartet-repertoire (think of the wrenching private-opera scene in the “Cavatina” from Beethoven’s Op. 130), this music does seem to glow with a tremendous life. It’s almost as if all previous music in the quartet-genre had somehow gotten in the way if the “direct speaking voice” of these instruments, like the words of an actor’s script. Now, all of the sudden, it might feel as if these instruments were letting out the painful, horrible croak of a long-repressed humanity.
To a certain extent, this effect stems from Lachenmann’s dual aesthetic project in the ’60s: on the one hand, to “free” sound from the conservative captivity of mere personal expression, or the avant-garde shackles of total structuralist control; on the other hand, to reconnect sound with its processes of realization, or “birth” even — as Lachenmann himself said, sound as “information about the conditions of its creation.”
But this second goal isn’t entirely innocent, or free of historical baggage: listening, for instance, to Beethoven’s last string quartets, one hears a similar alienation. Music doesn’t arise from nowhere, polished, perfected, unfolding fine; it births itself into existence, often in fantastically convoluted and painful bouts of confusion. It seems to convince that it doesn’t merely sound through air, it breathes it, perhaps even for the first time. Possibly Lachenmann wanted to keep alive this specter of creation-conditions, under radically different terms and sounds? To the degree that his work refuses to conceal its birth-pangs, it resuscitates the myth of an “all-too-human music,” which had reached its ambivalent apotheosis in Beethoven’s late quartets. ~ Seth Brodsky
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/gran-torso-for-string-quartet#ixzz1YSAuA2KQ
