Helmut Lachenmann’s String Quartet n° 2: Analysis 

Really enjoyed this. Thanks!

Lachenmann is the greatest composer alive. I personally met him and I'm now studying his composition "Dal Niente (Interieur III)" for my clarinet degree. His music is difficult for sure but at the same time enlightening.

Lachenmann, the final boss of contemporary music.

I react to music like this in so many ways- from intense intrigue to skeptical dismissal- depending on my state of mind. It gives some comfort to hear even Mr. Andreyev whose ear has been long immersed in these kind of pieces can have wildly varying reactions.

George Crumb’s definition of music as “a system of proportions at the service of a spiritual impulse” seems to hold true here, too. Affinities between Lachenmann’s Second Quartet and Black Angels, not least, appear to include a shared fascination with Bartók. Samuel Andreyev, you are a marvel; thank you for your wonderful work.

Lachenmann, I must confess, is a composer I have not looked at very much, despite being aware of his work and its incredibly distinctive nature and influence in the stratified/stratifying western music tradition (Lachenmann lying within the avant-garde "art" music strata). It was refreshing to hear your comments regarding the challenging nature of this piece. I think there is a misconception that we should simply understand and, as a result, demonstrate appreciation for music through simple enjoyment/pleasure alone. When really appreciation is much more nuanced and is not always a given. I enjoyed your analysis, cheers!

I heard this performed by the Arditti Quartet in my town, like two years ago. Instantly fell in love with Lachenmann!

Thank you for your work

This is so great! Thank for you this analysis, super in depth and really great insights to understanding his music

Yes, Lachenmann's is best listened too with an openness to sound itself. It is the very unfamiliar novel sounds that create a musical mystery that unfolds not just with repeated listenings, but with a passive hearing of his works. Taking in the sounds and music uncritically seems to reveal it's meanings more transparently. My appreciation of his works began with a an utter rejection of it to becoming one of my favorite composers. As a composer of electronic music I have come to view Lachenmann's music like using acoustic instruments, live in space to create the novel sounds that I do with electronics and samples. I guess that is another affinity I have with this great composer of enigmatic music, as you say. Wonderful and inspiring analysis again by you, Samuel. many thanks.

A fantastic analysis. Thank you so much Samuel!

I really like this format (analysis). Hope to see more in future. :)

Excellent analysis, a very useful intro into Lachenmann's music, bravo

Thank you very much for this video! I personally find Lachenmanns music very powerful and expressive. I had the opportunity to meet him while the orchestra of my school prepared Schreiben for him, and I listened to many of his chamber music and solo pieces live. It was such and experience! However, I have to remark one concert of Quatour Diotima in which they played albsn berg, Lachenmann Quatour no 3 and Brahms quartet no 2. Sorry Alban and Johannes, but Helmut really reaches other level of music pleasure!!

Fantastic analysis of a fantastic piece!

i was just introduced to lachenmann the other day - great timing!

Listend to this piece a year ago, time to try it gain. great content as always 👌

Thank you for this beautiful analysis, Herr Webern :)

Thank you Samuel, great video!

Wow, I've *literally* just purchased Lachenmann's complete string quartets on Bandcamp, about an hour before you posted this video. I'm a Lachenmann n00b :-) (Stopped video, so I could listen to the piece before hearing your analysis) _

How did this skip by me for 4 days? Love it, thank you!!

Great work Samuel, Lachenmann deserves more recognition.

The string quartet is such a versatile ensemble, almost endlessly versatile. Some of the extended techniques remind if Andy Mckee style guitar playing.

Very interesting comparison to Wagner! I always thought of him as similar to Schoenberg for some of the same reasons, especially from their germanic-historical vision of music, the stylistic variety in their works through their lives, and their influence on their respective following generation of composers that have taken their ideas and made it their own (in Schoenberg that would be composers like Boulez and Stockhausen who are interested in exploring serialization beyond its relationship with tonal music and, in Lachenmann, composers like Bedrossian and Mark Andre that seem more preoccupied with their own musical world than constantly worrying about "l’écoute désarmée")

As usual a wonderful video! It gave me a new perspective on Lachenmanns Music. I never really had a problem listening to his music. On the other hand I find some of the statements he makes in interviews quite overblown and a little bit to german (I'm german myself) for my taste. ;)

Merci profondément pour cette vidéo...

Great insights about seemingly mysterious music.. The residual resonance effect is striking, Lachenmann uses it also in one of his piano pieces, can't recall the name. Very effective. The point about trying to forget about the Lachenmannites and judging the music for what it is is well taken. I have a hard time doing that though.

thanks for the score leaks doc

Really fine and patient analysis and explanation of the techniques involved. I have only listened to the samples you have provided and feel like somebody could actually use those techniques to create something a little more continuous and musical. The entire post-modern theoretical perspective in painting, literature and music is all about upending our expectations, subverting....criticizing the validity of the past, especially emotions...and I'm not sure that starting point is always true about not being able to listen to something from the past and have it mean the same thing today...that can be true--but everything that has happened in the world has not erased everything that has happened in the world...the horrors of the 20th century did not mean that love or emotions (save the bleakest) no longer exist. What we have at our disposal now as listeners and especially as composers is the challenge of writing for ears that have heard everything...and experience a kind of whiplash effect depending on what they are listening to at a given time, against anything that is quite different from that very particular thing...you have to be more flexible not less as a composer and not abandon any avenue...that is theoretical perspectives are great at creating interesting ideas and theories but they don't always generate great art. There is a kind of political purity test for academic composers. In reality there was a more organic relationship to change and innovation in music before the theorists got a hold of music....when theorist described what music did rather than prescribing what music should do.

Returning to the Mona lisa after being blinded by all of its replicas. Thank you for this magnificent analysis.

So cool to NOT waste a half-hour on RU-vid. Thanks as always. Im going to check him out..

thoroughly enjoyed this

Amazing analysis and commentary as always Samuel. Especially interesting to see how Lachenmann's piece somewhat resembles the Bartok @ 23:10. The snippet from the Lachenmann piece @ 22:25 sounds like an orchestra of well-pitched and articulate insects.

Absolutely correct with the Wagner analogy. So many fearfully earnest imitators that in the event don't get it (this is true of Nono too I think). One thing that jumps out at me is Lachenmann's sense of humour. The "backwards sounds" in particular. In terms of the history of more recent music how many times have soubds played backwards been used to convey some type of "expression"?

Great analysis, thanks Samuel, I would also say that a modern master (IMO) of the quartet form was Grażyna Bacewicz, I’d love to hear your thoughts on her work, as she’s one of my favorite composers, her two Piano Quintets are absolutely magnificent

Thanks for this great work. I've been enamored with Frank Bridge works for String Quartets. I'm just learning theory. I want to know about them however I feel I may be rushing ahead of getting better rooting in theory by trying to understand those compositions. Frank Bridge is great and underrated.

Remarkable, thank you!

Great video.

11:05 brilliant analogy

Your work is soo good.

"An energy field that is moving." I like that as a description of music.

Bank wants to lend a Stradivarius to a violinist. Violinist says he wants to play Lachenmann. Bank puts violin back in safe.

masterwork

35:29 - Is there anything left once you stripe the piece away of the "surface attributes"? It's a bit like a 'painting' by Burri or Fontana. (And the term "surface attributes" is not to be intended negatively in my opinion).

Sería una maravilla poder escuchar este video en español.

Hilariously a neighbour started using a loud gardening device as soon as I got to the analysis of flautato sounds so I had to save this on my watch later.

3:43 In respect of string quartets written as one exception in the romantic era (e.g. Verdi, but also Smetana (2) or Brahms (3); Schumann wrote 3, Mendelssohn 6 - for Haydn it wasn't possible to publish string quartets other than as a set of 3 or 6). There was also Antonín Dvořák with his 14 works, who is often not considered as too important in quartet writing. But I think, there was more to him. There is more to music than producing exceptions. Even in Schoenbergs 2nd quartet there is a moment, that sounds like Dvořák. He was more important than connaisseurs might think.

Thanks

I had heard this string quartet on the radio before but I had no idea is was Lachenmann. I thought it was Mozart.

Interesting analysis. I'm not sure I really like much of Lachenmann's music but I've come back to it several times. Not always for the same reason, sometimes its just a useful compendium of extended techniques, sometimes I try (and usually fail) to follow the structure and logic of a piece. Sometimes I try to listen to the sounds without expectation, which often works for a while but then I usually lose interest. Useful to know that he uses twelve tone rows in this - I didn't pick that up but it aligns with my subjective experience of listening in the sense that his pieces often lack a coherent thread and larger scale sense of forward movement. (I think twelve tone organisation has some fatal flaws in that respect) It feels like any part of the piece could occur at any point. Despite all that I still feel there is something of interest here which is just outside of my reach. My composition teacher used to say that 'the jury is still out on Lachenmann'.

Thanks for the analysis. Where can one read about the form of HL's quartets? The way its material is structured and developed? Especially curious about the 3rd quartet ('Grido')

As a composer myself, now in my mid-sixties, I very much admired the wealth of scholarship and cogency you brought to this video essay. I would love to sit and talk with you in pleasing surroundings! My problem is with this piece, along with the many pieces of manuscript paper ruined by the inconsequential doodles of Brian Ferneyhough, is that no matter how hard I try I can't get people who enjoy listening to classical music from, say, before the 1920s, interested in them. Fernyhough, especially, but others from the so called school of New Complexity, simply don't get it that most people don't listen to classical music to be prozletized at or preached to. They listen for that much underestimated and now seemingly contemptible quality of pleasure. And the avant-garde can't go on forever, can it? Your analogy to the back side of a painting is apt. The way the paint was applied, the brush strokes, with way the paint might have been overlaid, the possibility that the superficial painting might have formerly been something completely different, are all of interest to the art scholar, but to the general public, what they admire most IS that superficial, remaining work. And it must work that way because so few of us get to analyze classical art in the ways I have described. Now, students are taking the memes of the New Complexity style and calling it music. WIth the creation of music notation software, we can all create music derivative of Ferneyhough and others, because the software does all the hard work (like alignment, for instance) for us. I would like to hope that something rebounds from this: The School of New Simplicity, perhaps? A style of music where the listener is put first rather than the student of music. And we wonder why music is barely taught in schools any more. The health of an art is in danger when those who teach it fail to understand those who practise it.

Great Analysis as usual! Any chance of you analyzing a Jarrell piece in the future?

Sometimes I wonder if it even makes sense to listen to a piece such as this on CD or RU-vid instead of listening - and *seeing*! - it performed live. Hm.

Is this a new youtube feature or something? I cannot see the video without a lot of unbearable ads. This was not the case with your earlier videos, was it?

His works sound very romantic.

Good video! I agree that one should focus on the "music" and not the surface of sounds and how they are produced. Judge the piece of the impression it gives. Is it good written? Is it meningful to the listeners and players? Does it give more than it takes? But on the other hand, besides the music, when you see it performed, the unusual handling of the instruments also becomes a big part of the impression. But I don't think Lachenmann has thought about that as much as for ex. Kagel has. In Kagel's music the element of "instrumental theatre" is as important as the sounds themselves. But Lachenmann is probably aware of that and considers that to be a part of his music too.

I'm thinking of getting this on CD. Is the JACK Quartet any good in this repertoire?

Very interesting analysis of a very interesting piece of music, by a channel that I really enjoyed to discover. The caveat in the end however sounded like the kind of stuff that made me quit music school. The idea that you could somehow abstract from the actual sounds of the piece (conceived as its surface) is really a very Darmstadt way of thinking about music, all about compositional intention and control. These kinds of concepts obviously produced some interesting music (and lots of boring stuff too...), but from a Brazilian perspective they have also meant that the world is divided between places that can afford the costs of very specific compositional control (and therefore very specialized players with plenty of time to rehearse etc) and those who doesn't. Am I too far off expecting some discussion in this channel of things like (keeping it in the realm of fairly canonical stuff from the "Western" world) free improv (Derek Bailey) or process based composition in the cagean tradition (Alvin Lucier's I'm sitting in a room or Steve Reich's Pendulum Music)? Even if Andreyev hates these kinds of things (nothing wrong with that...) it would be interesting to hear what he thinks about them. Anyway, congratulations on the channel, I'm now a very interested subscriber.

MORE MORE MORE PLS

When I think of Wagner I think of his commitment to a convergence of all art forms towards a singular dramatic or narrative purpose. I’m not sure I understand your comparison.

Thank you for that! I have been wondering about Lachenmann's role in music history. Was he really the first to write music that utilizes playing the instruments using every part of their bodies? Doing that sort of thing appears to me as a staple/cliche of the 1960s and 1970s, thinking of e.g. Kagel or some Free Jazz musicians, even Stockhausen (although he usually is interested in the electronic side of that kind of activity, as in Microphonie 1), or maybe Cage's very central embracement of the Nebengeräusche.

I'm not a sophisticated listener. But I somehow find Lachenmann's quartet music physically pleasurable to listen to.

WARNING! At 21:17 my dogs barked way too loud!

Would you have an analysis on kurtag stele!?

New camera?

Very nice analysis. I also liked your propposal to look at the musical thought and not only to the sounds. But I disagree when you talk about leaving Lachenmann's political thought behind. The power of his aesthetics comes from his political position. Thanks for the vídeo.

newbie！

I always have wild reactions to Lachenmann’s music. I either think it’s really cool or really stupid. Never anything in between.

1:11 is this math or music?....i see musical notation reminiscent of its mathematical neighbor.

Great channel !! Could you analyse "Solo pour Deux" by Grisey?

Lol original recordings of bartok quartets are terrifying

Who has Lachenmann 'influenced' other than students of 'contemporary' 'composition'? Especially 'worldwide'. Also, on a more practical basis, don't you not think that Lachenmann didn't actually develop these 'advanced' instrumental techniques, he just gave some instructions and handed them over to musicians like Irvine Arditti who had to make them into actual music?

Any parallel with traditional classical music betrays the purpose of the neue Musik , of its philosophy.

My composition teacher refers to Lachenmann as a charlatan

Wagner was a star with many, many fans who PAID for his music.

Do you need a composer to produce this sort of thing? Surely a random number generator would do just as well! I guarantee you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

As someone completely untrained in music who's coming here mostly from just listening to Mozart and Beethoven for a long time, my first reaction was an overwhelming "Oh Go Fuck Yourself Lachenmann!". Norm-violation does not an artist make.

Very funny….to talk seriously about Lachenmann! Monty Python.

Lachenmann should build his own instruments for „his music“…and not to struggle with stupid violins and oboes…ridiculous.

This is a fine and illuminating analysis, as always, but Lachenmann is unlistenable, unmusical noise. I have no problems with avant-garde works, even aggressively confrontational ones, but I am certain nobody has ever genuinely enjoyed a piece by Lachenmann, and he would doubtless find it disgustingly bourgeois if anyone ever said they had. His compositions will be forgotten minutes after he's dead. I won't even get into his ludicrous liner notes and tiresomely screechy 'leftist' politics. There, I said it.

One day you'll realise that there's so much other types of complexity in music that isn't made to entice your brain.