Helmut Lachenmann Mouvement (-vor der Erstarrung) Ensemble intercontemporain Matthias Pintscher, direction Enregistré en direct le 11 juin 2015 à la Philharmonie de Paris, Grande Salle - Philharmonie 1
If a small orchestra of instruments were washed up on shore, and left to the soundings made by wind and wave, this is 25 minutes of what we might hear. The idea of pure acoustics and natural sonority seem to motivate this music. There were moments of tidal tension that were exquisite. Around minute 16 I could swear nature was doing a ragtime. The music becomes very jazzy and dramatic. Then quiet ensues with soft rumbles and rustlings. I'm glad someone dreamed of these opportunities for sound made by musical instruments. By the way, was that premature applause toward the end or a clapalong by the audience? Hands popping on mouthpieces? Bows on wood itself? Is the ocean reclaiming its booty? Fabulous, endless possibilities. I was deeply impressed.
god you must think that glasses dropped on the floor and piss filled jars make great art too? the kind of people one finds on these videos are effing insufferable. you would probably call someone playing a penis bone flute a genius, and someone playing percussion on elephant shit a miracle of sound
This music might sound random to you but it's not. It has structure. Just because you think that music has to conform to tonal harmony to be enjoyed doesn't mean that's the case for everyone. But apparently it's unimaginable for you that there are people who genuinely like this music.
The very essence of Lachenmann's music, the birth of the acoustic sense sound, the timbre that takes shape inside the instrument, as a gesture, breath sound matter .. creating or movements .. ... How "Dal niente" to cite another important work written for clarinet by the great German composer Extraordinary interpretation as always EIC
This is Music, gentlemen. In its founding aspects: sound, silence and noise. A counterpoint of these paradigms at the highest expressive levels. Absolutely brilliant.
merveilleuse performance. Bravo et merci a votre merveilleux orchestre, qui m'a toujours fasciné et qui défend et propage si merveilleusement la belle musique de notre temps.
The totality of the nuances of this sound architecture is like a flight in the Sublime, it is one of the most evocative music I have ever listened to so far. It's played with a feeling of tremendous inner power. A delightful listening experience.
I heard the piece at a time when I really disliked Lachenmann: This producing of sounds had simply not interested me. I was at a concert for Harrison Birtwistle and accepted the fact that Lachenmann was on the programme. And then this piece became a converting experience for me: as if one could create a virtuoso magic in the manner of Tchaikovsky with these noises. Perhaps it is something else when you hear it in concert and not as a recording. In the real room acoustics, these noises that keep suddenly transforming for a moment into something like "almost music" was exciting!
Extraordinary utterances and growlings. Much too much of Mattias Pintscher swaying about looking solemn when I would have preferred to see who was making the strange sounds and how.
People have to let themselves enjoy this kind of music, when they can. It's not easy to listen, but I find that it's actually easier than you may think to find something enjoyable in composers like Lachenmann. People that criticize modern composers are usually familiar with classical tunes that are easy to the ear, but music has never been about that. Wagner's "Die Valkyrie" is more than 3 hours long, yet people say they enjoy Wagner after they only listened to the ride of the Valkyries. I'll tell you, the rest of the opera is not easier to listen to than Lachenmann.
irony of folks to complain about this being pretentious when its on them for expecting everything to fit their standards this is just music. it's not so deep of a movement that you have to fear it. if you don't like it that's fine. just dont try to find some deeper meaning in that.
The biggest irony of people calling Lachenmann and similar composers "pretentious" is that you have to be extremely modest and LACKING in vanity to compose a piece such as this. Because the masses hate it. You will face more hostility than worship. If anything is depressive Hollywood soundtrack minimalism "pretentious". Postmodernism is full of pretentious BS: cheap music, evoking cheap feelings, making the masses feel smarter and deeper than they actually are. By contrast, you have throw all vanity and all attempts to impress the masses and young female models or whatever away if you want to compose and perform music such as Lachenmann's!
@@boschblue > you have to be very brave to make music that most people hate That sounds a bit pretentious to me; I mean, is high art pretentious? Is it just signaling how "refined" ones taste (to other high-class (not necessarily rich) people) is? I also cringe at minimalism, but it seems pretentious to care about simplicity/complexity/popularity/exclusivity. Well, that's just semantics. I mean, music ultimately doesn't matter, so nobody's taste is better or worse.
awe lotta "Music doesn't ultimately matter, so nobody's tastes are better or worse." Music not ultimately mattering does not prevent some people from having more refined and intelligent tastes than that of others. Obviously not everyone has the same level of intelligence, education and refinement, and the higher those traits/qualities/abilities are in a particular field or area of interest for a single person, than the more superior that person's tastes in that area will be, broadly speaking. As for objectively determining who has the best tastes and what those tastes must therefore be, and for how much subjectivity and bias might play a role in these tastes, well that's a whole other matter, and maybe an impossible one to unravel.
@@crawlingamongthestars3736 I feel like you just said the opposite of what I said and presented that as evidence for why I'm wrong. Are you trying to make a distinction between "better/worse" tastes and "refined/unrefined" tastes? Or a distinction between art quality and individual taste (i.e. that regardless of the objective quality of art, an individual can have good or bad taste based on how he chooses). How do you define "intelligence, education and refinement" without referencing taste? Taking music for example, I might measure intelligence as "ability", such as to produce music. People produce all sorts of music for all sorts of audiences and popularity (success) seems to be heavily influenced by chance, so it seems that every genre can be considered to have intelligent people who, even just broadly speaking, supposedly have good taste. Yet different genres can have quite opposite target aesthetics. I assume now that a "good" aesthetic would persist somewhat across genres (otherwise, a conversation about something like Helmut Lachenmann wouldn't make sense); if that's the case, then I don't think there can possibly be an objectively good taste. Otherwise if taste is exclusively defined with respect to genre, then I don't see what prevents someone from a) finding enough people with similar taste and b) calling any new taste a new genre.
@awe lotta There's a lot to address in your most recent comment, and I don't have the time to engage with all of it, but as to the initial point you made, that I said the opposite of what you said, and then presented it as evidence as to why you are wrong, maybe you had a different meaning in mind when you stated that music doesn't ultimately matter so nobody's tastes are better or worse, than the way I interpreted it, but for the sake of maybe an attempt at clarification on my part, I will re-phrase what I said previously as a response: it seemed to me that by saying "music doesn't ultimately matter" you meant that it doesn't matter because nothing actually matters in an objective sense (which goes into the whole "there is no God, so there is no teleology, thus there is no ultimate purpose for anything, thus nothing ultimately can be said to matter" strain of thought), and because nothing matters (including music) on an objective, ultimate level, no sort of value distinctions can be made, even on human terms, as relating to human interests and goals, which is where in my mind I came into disagreement (at least with your perceived meaning, on my part), and replied as I did to indicate that I felt the opposite of this, that value distinctions can still be made (at least on a human level, as impacting humans), specifically as regarding music in this case, and what can be defined as good music and bad music, and that perhaps a step or two down the right avenue towards making these determinations is by looking to the most intelligent, experienced, educated and refined people's (at least in the area of music) tastes in music, to be able to determine what the best music is, and I should add here, across as wide a variety of different cultures, backgrounds and classes as possible (for example, a person could come out of a fairly impoverished, uncultured blue-collar background, and yet still have a high degree of intelligence and appreciation of music, yet may not have much exposure to say, classical music, and lacks a formal education, yet is deeply entrenched in traditional folk Americana music, rockabilly and punk rock, and has spent many years cultivating an ability for composing and performing in a punk rock style influenced by traditional folk Americana, rockabilly etc., and for these reasons can now make this sort of music at an exceptionally aesthetically pleasing level, and many people across an enormously large spectrum of different backgrounds and tastes, but who are all ideally open-minded, intelligent and musically keen, can recognize the punk music this person creates to be "objectively" very good, within the constraints and limitations of the style he (or she) creates within, even if this style is comparitively very minimal, and not to mention more musically traditional in the sense that it is tonal and mostly consonant, to say a modern classical orchestral piece, or bebop or free jazz compositions/improvisations, etc). But I guess even though you can make the argument that a particular "minimal" music is extremely artistically accomplished within the constraints imposed (by self or otherwise), the "objectively" most sophisticated music, and therefore, "best", might be the most maximal music, composed (pre-composed that is, not "spontaneously", which is to say, improvised) in the most intelligent and creative way, though even within a maximal setting, there still should be the self-imposition of limitation in certain moments, for the sake of a fluid pacing and dynamism, so a minimalist sense might creep in here as well, unless the objective would be to eliminate all fluidity of pacing period, which would be an entirely different context of musical endeavor, and then here again I suppose the question inevitably pops up of "what IS good music?", or even, more extremely "what IS music?"...
@@MorganHayes_Composer.Pianist okay I'm happy to have someone that can answer my questions. I haven't, maybe I judged too quickly. But still I'm not enjoying a minute and I don't understand what is genius about it
its marked in the score as shell attacks. A specific metallic sound of striking the shells of the timpani. They were probably turned upside down for easy access to the bowl.
@@manolitosanchez Lachenmann called his music "instrumental musique concrete". He wants the music to sound like electronics and manipulated natural sounds.
@@tomfurgas2844 the fact that he called it like that goes more with the sense of perceptual detachment of sound from its familiar source than with it "sounding like electronic music".
@father merrin That is interesting ! So why did he-and many others- bother to write so much of this? Funny how all this so called hyper-thought out music sounds as total chaos.
His aesthetic is very consistent from one piece to the next but 'Mouvment' sounds very different to 'March Fatale' and 'Variations on a theme Schubert' to name the most obvious examples.
Por qué nunca sitúan una cámara fija en vez de hacer acrobacias fílmicas y fragmentar toda la interpretación. o por qué en vez de enfocar exclusivamente al director no muestran esos momentos de alta complejidad interpretativa que me son más relevantes! Que gusto el de complicar las cosas, no tiene sentido excelente interpretacion
I dont get it and I dont think I ever will. I dont hear any emotional bandwith in this music. Are there people who get goosebumps when listening to this?
I do. I genuinely do. I can understand not liking the sounds, but there is a very clear movement through the piece; there's tension, momentum---the only major difference between this and a more 'traditional' piece is that timbre and colour take the place of tone, for the most part, as what is interacting with (creating and responsing to) the forward momentum that drives the piece. That's where I feel goosebumps, where I feel the music: in the interaction between the propulsive forward movements and achingly tense deaccelerations, and the constantly shifting, deeply emotive timbres employed.
@@callumsutherland2954 i agree. It doesn't lend itself to sampling ( youtube lends itself well to this) as so much of the excitement derives from the structural ebb and flow. Patience!
Junk food is cheap, while junk music is expensive - the only difference. Has Lachenmann contributed anything to evolution of music as an artform? Has he created anything new, anything which will survive one-time performance? Has he achieved new artistic results? No. Lachenmann brought music to the deadend.
@@YT-st8jq Did Schoenberg and Nancarrow know about their 'judges' in Darmstadt? Did they care about Darmstadt? (((( The real value of composer's creativity lies in initiated events - in creation of new systems of musical material organization - for example, dodecaphony, polytempo or synchronous music, which have and will continue to have a great influence on further development of music as an art form. Music evolution has tendencies that inevitably lead to the emergence of new systems of material organization. The way the material is organized is primary. Style, artistic images, musical language, means of expression are secondary. Those composers whom we perform in 200 or 300 years after their death, consciously or not, sought to become initiators of such events. Not everyone succeeded.
Frank Feldman there’s definitely a lot of pretentiousness in this comment section. People are going on like this is the greatest piece of music ever when it’s really just a weird piece that tries to push the boundary of what counts as music.
I'm sorry I don't like it to be honest. It feels pointless. I really do understand the direction of it, but the language has become hacknied, it appears to have great clarity and direction, but it feels unlike this.
Another failed German composer, in a long line since the death of Paul Hindemith. Here's a classic example of it. A ghastly work, written in the 1980's producing sounds and combinations most of which had all been done 30 years before. I'm sure all the musicians performing it enjoyed the hours and hours of practice, tuition and examinations they took in order to produce such nonsense.
@@johnatwell2753 Really, I'll let my ex-professors at the Royal Academy know, where I studied for 3 years. Thanks for your reply that did little to argue with my point.
There is no point, except the "sounds and combinations most of which had all been done 30 years before" is ridiculous. This was written in 1984, and it is still as fresh and new as it was then. Lachenmann has an original sound that I can differentiate and enjoy. In that way, he is a success. Who do you think did this "30 years before" 1984? Sure wasn't Hindemith. If he is the peak of German music to you, you are very poorly educated indeed.
@@johnatwell2753 I'm pleased you at least got that message, but I haven't got a problem if you do. However, it doesn't mean that I "know nothing about music". Thanks buddy, you're an inspiration to us all.
Twenty-four minutes to establish that this sentiment could have been communicated in three. Musical masturbation combined with edging... A musical version of math, not prose. Congratulations to the musicians for realizing this notation. Condolences to those that are just looking for motives, fragments, much less anything melodic.
