Peter Eötvös / Ensemble Modern HELMUT LACHENMANN Schwankungen am Rand

The New York Times recently asked the question "Who is the most influential European composer of the moment?" and answered that no name "comes to mind more immediately than that of Helmut Lachenmann: The best of his work takes you by the hand and will not let you go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected."

The first New Series disc by the great German composer/inventor resounds with startling sound-events, realized brilliantly – and dramatically – by the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, under the inspired direction of Peter Eötvös. These compositions from 1974/75, 1983/84 and 1992 represent key moments in Lachenmann's restless voyage of sound-discovery. But as he reminds us, uncovering "new" sounds is but the beginning of the process: "The discovery of a sound, or even a new soundscape ... does not merely open up a new creative paradise to the composer; at the start it generates 'problems' ... It is, after all, a question of the permanent opening up of aural perception..."

In an insightful liner note, Lachenmann writes of the way in which the composing of "Schwankungen am Rand" („Fluctuations at the Edge“) changed his work and his life: "When the project was completed, I was no longer the person I had been; I was ready for adventures in other thought zones. Finally, I seemed to have arrived at a place that allowed me to look in all directions..." The compositional process had been a laborious one. Taking his cue from the "thunder sheets" used in his former teacher Luigi Nono's Diario Pollacco I, Lachenmann had spent weeks exploring the sound properties of sheets of steel: "I began banging on them every which way, dragging them across the floor over soft and hard surfaces, plying them with metal rods. I struck them, scraped them, dropped them edge first onto the floor, so that the glissando-ing metal sheet bent, doubled up, contorted, acquired nicks ... and at some point these objects turned into radically deformed monster violins with super-pizzicato-fluido sounds, or they took on the character of huge, exceedingly reverberant flexatones ..." An ensemble was implied of real and imaginary instruments, incorporating "an arsenal made up of sources of sonance and resonance ranging all the way to the naked white noises of loudspeakers, 'crumple zones' of crushed wrapping paper crackling, and expansive echo chambers." In the process, Lachenmann found himself asking what, in this context, does a tone, an interval, a chord, a figure, mean? And what, indeed, is music?

"Schwankungen am Rand" is an important pioneering work, and one that prompts Jürg Stenzl, in a CD booklet essay to assert that, to certain extent Lachenmann "reinvented instrumental music [...] To claim that Lachenmann's works present a challenge is seemingly to state the obvious. But our musical culture has scarcely anything so exciting, fascinating, moving and terrifying to offer its inquisitive listeners as the music of Helmut Lachenmann."
Both the Ensemble Modern and its larger offshoot, the Ensemble Modern Orchestra have worked closely with Helmut Lachenmann. When the expanded EMO gave its premiere performances in 1998, it played "Schwankungen am Rand", under the direction of Peter Eötvös. Eötvös is also the dedicatee of "Mouvement – vor der Erstarrung", and the Ensemble Modern gave the German premiere of this dark work in 1984, a performance described by the composer as "incredibly inspired and precise". Lachenmann has called "Mouvement" a "final attempt to strike water out of the dead monument known as music"; it is, he says, "a music of dead movements, almost of final quivers."

"Die ... zwei Gefühle ...", incorporating texts of Leonardo da Vinci, was written in 1992 while Lachenmann was working on what has since become his most highly-acclaimed work, the opera "Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern"; in expanded form, the piece was subsequently incorporated into the opera.

In the context of the present CD, "Die ... zwei Gefühle ..." traces a connection to the Nono-inspired "Schwankungen am Rand". It was written "near the Sardinian town of Alghero, in the empty house of my friend Luigi Nono, who had died two years earlier. And like him, I had been driven by my burning desire to perceive the enormous confusion of diverse and strange forms brought forth by ingenious Nature ..." (ECM Records)