Helmut Lachenmann: Kurzportrait mit Selbstportrait

Characteristics of Helmut Lachenmann’s music are approached through the author’s own music and musical thinking, intertwining portrait and self-portrait. Lachenmann’s music reflects problems of a recent history of composition and asks key questions about music’s relation to society. It challenges, for example, the position of composers/writers towards collective standards, but also reflects what critical thinking can mean in a society that consumes criticism and makes it part of its own system. Polyvalent structural relationships within Lachenmann’s music reflect his insistent method of observing and perceiving, of re-working, re-shaping traditional modes of listening. Whereas the terms »revolutionary« and »novelty« (not only in contemporary music) have become commodities or matters of fast changing trends, Helmut Lachenmann can be characterized as a »homo differentialis« whose work substantiates an existential necessity to bring music to the ear of the listener