The Anti-Systematic System:

Hans Zender’s Third Way between Lachenmann and Ferneyhough

Håvard Enge, University of Oslo

In music, as in most other areas, postmodernism seems to be a concept which has lost its
relevance – or at least, its popularity. But if the so-called postmodern music was never really
postmodern, it is still important to explore how the experience of pluralism changed musical
modernism, and not the least: how it might continue this transformation in constructive ways.
The German composer and conductor Hans Zender (born 1936) has addressed this
question in increasingly pointed ways in both his works and his theoretical essays. In this
paper, I will discuss his theory of microtonal harmony, which he developed in the 1990s and
refers to as an “anti-systematic system”. I will emphasize how Zender situates his theory as a
“third way” between the school-building ideas of Lachenmann and Ferneyhough. As well as
offering a middle way between the approaches to harmony in the works of these dominant
contemporary modernists, Zender’s “anti-systematic system” suggests ways in which the
experience of pluralism might be integrated in a flexible and open-ended, but still essentially
modernist way of composition.

Zender’s “gegenstrebige Fügung”

During the 1980s, when the discussions on musical postmodernism reached Germany, Zender
wrote several texts where he principally recognized the theoretical terms of the present “post-
modern condition”. He characterized the aesthetic openness enabled by the virtual coexistence
of all musical times and places as a great possibility for composers, but also as a great danger.
In Zender’s opinion, musical postmodernism must be aesthetically “responsible” – the
juxtaposition of different styles has to be worked through formally. Even though he has
championed musical pluralism since the 1960s, and is most acknowledged internationally for
his “composed interpretations” of classical works, Zender has never had any patience with
uncommitted eclectism or unreflected recycling of pre-modernistic forms. His own kind of
cautious and conditional support of musical postmodernism was not unusual among German
composers in the 1980s and 1990s. However, Zender has increasingly sought to define his
music beyond the dichotomy of modernism and postmodernism. In a text from 2004 where he
interrogates himself about the unity of his work, he questions the common presupposition that

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modernism is about compositional unity and postmodernism about compositional pluralism.
Instead, he redefines modernism as a search for multiplicity:

Where is the internal unity of a work dealing with the same intensity with a continuation of the
radically non-representational approach of modernism, with a current reworking of the European tradition, and
with a productive confrontation with the fundamentally different East Asian way of thinking? For a few years I
have, at least negatively, tried to define a unity: turning away from the clichés of modernism, as well as
postmodernism—from pseudo-abstract arts and crafts as well as historically or exotically oriented randomness . . .
Today I believe that the deepest impulse of modernism is a turning to (non-homogeneous, irreducible)
multiplicity. Multiplicity—this also means openness for the unexpected.

Zender’s identification of modernism with heterogeneity is strikingly unorthodox in

the context of music, where the movement has gained an uneasily fitting reputation of
searching for a unified and strictly logical construction. But in Zender’s opinion, ideals like
unity and systematization should not be rejected totally. Instead, they should be brought into a
productive and paradoxical play by being juxtaposed with and superimposed on their
opposites, fragmentation and chaos. For Zender, the most interesting music derives from using
several different, even contrary principles of construction simultaneously.
From the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Zender retrieves the expression
palintonos harmonia—“antagonistic harmony,” or gegenstrebige Fügung, as Zender renders it
in German. He uses the term in several essays in order to articulate his overriding interest in
the productive confrontation of aesthetic contradictions. Recalling Heraclitus’s image of
“antagonistic harmony, as in bows and lyres,” Zender seeks a new energy in the unification
(not the reconciliation) of contradictory tensions. His confrontations with works of the
European classical canon, in works like Schuberts “Winterreise” and Schumann-Phantasie is
only the most obvious examples of Zender’s interest in “Gegenstrebigkeit”.

Pure and equal temperament

In this paper, I will discuss his appliance of gegenstrebige Fügung in the area of
compositional theory: his confrontation of the chromatic pitches of the equal temperament in
the European tradition with the whole-numbered pitches of the overtone series, and his
development of a method of modulation that confronts acoustic laws with modernist
constructivism. Playing with the Heraclitian term, he calls his harmonic theory
“Gegenstrebige Harmonik”. Although the themes of confrontation and heterogeneity had
been vital for Zender since the 1960s, it was not until the 1990s that he constructed a
compositional system based on them. In 2000, Zender lectured on his new theory at the New
Music courses in Darmstadt, and the lecture has gained a considerable theoretical reception.

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 The contradiction Zender seeks to overcome in his theory of harmony is the well-
known discrepancy between the “pure” whole-numbered intervals of the overtone series and
the equally tempered chromatic intervals. It has never been a secret that the introduction of
equal temperament was a compromise: the flexibility of modulation was secured at the price
of the natural intonation of intervals and harmonies. The qualitative differences between the
intervals of the overtone series were leveled, and this mechanistic approach to otherwise
more complex phenomena, according to Zender, evokes positivism in science as well. Given
our growing awareness of the limitations and dangers of such mechanistic thinking, Zender
finds no excuse for an uncritical continuation of this approach in music: “For the thinking of
earlier decades obsessed with a naïve belief in progress, this way of thinking may have been
understandable and sufficient—for us today, it is no longer possible. Our ears have sharpened
up and demand more precise concepts.” He likewise finds that the dissatisfaction with equal
temperament and the fascination with microtonality comprise common points of interest for
contemporary composers and historical performance practitioners alike.
Zender associates the development of microtonality in the New Music scene with two
main perspectives. The first treats microtonal variations as changes in timbre, in an almost
visual way; the second applies them structurally, using serial methods of organization. In the
latter approach, the mechanistic approach of the twelve-tone temperament is only intensified,
Zender claims. Instead of a unilateral focus on further rationalization of music, Zender
suggests that one should seek the solution to the limits of the twelve-tone temperament by
combining technical refinement with a creative involvement with tradition:

Such solutions are sought not only through the means of ever more precise technologies, but also through a kind
of rejoining of forgotten historical experiences with our modern rationality. Only today we are learning to fully
recognize a certain property of history, namely the fact that the past is never past. The old signs of ancient
cultures—in our case the European musical tradition—lie as dormant powers, ready to make their energies
available for the new understanding of a young consciousness, even ready to reveal new aspects when placed in
a new context.

In Zender’s view, which is inspired by that of his late friend and mentor Bernd Alois
Zimmermann, this renewed engagement with tradition is no longer bound to an
understanding of history as linear progress; on the contrary, it involves a multidimensional,
non-linear field of connections. In his lecture on harmony, Zender articulates his ambition for
a so-called “responsible” pluralism, which creates an individually coherent and distinctive
sign language while remaining aware of the chaotic openness of the current aesthetic
situation:

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In the situation of a totally open aesthetic horizon imposed on us today by the historical development, it is clear
that we stand before the big task of developing new signs that are sufficiently clear and precise to come through
as understandable in the current Babel of languages.

However, such an individual language must no longer be represented as an objective and

general truth, Zender warns: “A solution can never be more than one among many and not
count as a ‘truth,’ for the infinity of the open horizon has made all dogma formations
absurd.”

Between Lachenmann and Ferneyhough

Zender chooses to define his approach to microtonality and harmony through a comparison of
what he refers to as the “school-forming” approaches of his contemporaries Helmut
Lachenmann (b. 1935) and Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943). Zender lets the two composers
exemplify the contrasting trends in microtonal music which he outlined earlier in the lecture:
the one working with tone colour and the other with structural organization. To create a
distinct language in the situation he refers to as a “Babel of languages”, Zender deems it
necessary to clarify the relation to neighbouring languages. However, he emphasizes that to
view this demarcation of his project as a debunking polemics against his fellow composers is
a severe misunderstanding of his pluralistic attitude.
Zender has conducted a lot of Lachenmann’s music, and is predominantly positive
towards his approach. Lachenmann’s response to the limitations of twelve-tone equal
temperament is to elude precise pitches altogether and explore what he calls “musique
concrète instrumentale’, the “noise colours” that ordinary instruments can provide. Zender
appreciates two aspects of Lachenmann’s project: first, its sheer wealth of unique acoustic
experiences, second, the new lucidity it gives to simple intervals when they make a rare,
unexpected appearance through sheets of noise. But in Zender’s opinion, Lachenmann’s
approach is no satisfactory solution to the formal problems of relating pitch and harmony. It is
“centripetal” music – it circles around tone colours and acoustic moments rather than creating
a temporal unfolding of form. In this sense, it resembles Scelsi’s music, since it invites the
listener to remain in a state of spontaneous, non-conceptual listening. In Zender’s opinion,
Lachenmann does not offer any new ways of making harmonic correspondences; the problem
is “postponed, but not resolved”.
Ferneyhough offers a contradictory solution that Zender criticizes more fundamentally.
The way Zender portrays it, Ferneyhough’s “school of complexism” seeks to renew worn-out

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intervals not by blurring them into noise but by multiplying serial techniques and thickening
linear structures to such an extent that the listener can no longer process them. Zender thus
describes Ferneyhough’s music as “centrifugal”—events are too dense to admit of a core of
any sort and force unique experiences to an extreme degree. Zender appreciates
Ferneyhough’s idea of letting the listener establishing correspondences in the work in an
individual act of reflection, but he argues that the “complexist” method of composition in fact
stands in the way for such a reflected listening. A main point in Zender’s concept of listening,
which he has explored in several essays, is that the reflection and interpretation of temporal
correspondences in a musical work always has to rely on a conscious concentration on the
momentary acoustic experience. But in contrast to Cage’s cult of the acoustic moment,
Zender’s concept of listening involves the active hermeneutics and memory process on the
part of the listener as vital aspects of experiencing a musical work. He claims that because
Ferneyhough’s extremely rational linearity makes the vertical structure indiscernible and
irrational, it becomes virtually impossible to reflect on the correspondences between acoustic
moments.
Zender, then, wants a third way that balances the centripetal and centrifugal forces
in music—that is, the emphasis on the singular acoustic moment and the temporal unfolding
of form. His perspective stresses the composer’s responsibility to the listener to offer a clear
and meaningful work in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions. This need for clarity is
particularly sharp in the case of microtonal music, Zender claims:

Especially the composer who invents new sonic and formal strategies, for instance by working with
microtonal constellations, must do everything to make his forms reach the ear with optimal clarity, to give the
ear a helping hand, as it were. What good are quarter-, sixth-, and twelfth tones, when the ear is not taught to
interpret them correctly? They will be read as distortions or as simple variants of the conventional.

For Zender, neither Lachenmann’s “centripetal” moment form nor Ferneyhough’s

“centrifugal” abstract linearity answers to his ideal of transparent complexity. Transferring
the principles of his aesthetics of listening to the act of composition, Zender identifies the
circular—in a sense, hermeneutic—relationship between vertical and horizontal construction
as a prerequisite for musical quality:

Within my “third” way the act of composing appears as “too simple” in an irresponsible manner when the
composer thinks “only” linearly or “only” of moments. Compositional quality can only be produced when a
rejoining of the vertical in the horizontal, of the horizontal in the vertical, truly takes place in the shaping
consciousness in each composed moment.

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 The way Zender sees it, an alternative to the chromatic equal temperament can not be
found on the surface, by using microtonal variants as tone colours in the manner of
Lachenmann – or of Scelsi, one could add. In a literally radical way, the fundaments of our
interval perception must be reconsidered:

In order to avoid the dilemma of the tempered chromaticism, a drastic measure is necessary, which must
penetrate to the fundaments of our tonal system. Its goal is to find a new harmonic method which also lets the
historical origins of our intervallic understanding shine through.

Out of the reconsideration of the genesis of our interval perception, Zender hopes to
construct a new system of pitch organization. It will not be hierarchic or dogmatic but
flexible in its relations. Here Zender demonstrates his ability to rise above the dichotomy of
modernism and postmodernism, combining a constructivism rooted in modernist composition
with a postmodernist’s recognition of the inevitability of pluralism. With his new theory of
harmony, he hopes to provide a platform that can incorporate a host of musical languages and
pitch systems, deriving from the most disparate times and places:

A completely new network of relations between pitches must be found, equally distant from the security of the
old tonality and from the serially ordered atonality, a network that at the same time can represent these and yet
other stages of historical thought. If the different traditional tone systems—including the non-European—were
each defined through a particular construction point, the network of correspondences would at least have to be
able to represent a variety of harmonic worlds by shifting the construction point within the same network:
worlds which already have existed in history and others which appear as future possibilities. To establish such a
network is now our task.

The idea of moving among different harmonic languages by shifting the “point of
construction” in the overriding net of relations amounts to Zender’s attempt to make
pluralism “responsible” in regard to the challenge of form. He hopes, in short, to facilitate the
incorporation of past, present, and even future harmonic languages into one net of reference.
[LANG VERSJON: To clarify this idea, I will give a basic overview of the technical
principles of Zender’s harmonic network.

Zender’s harmonic system

The first challenge Zender gives to himself, is to create a system which incorporates both the
pitches with whole-numbered ratios which make up the overtone series and the equally
tempered pitches of the chromatic scale. This can theoretically be done in two ways, he
maintains: by constantly changing the root tone, or by subdividing the equal temperament into
smaller steps. The first alternative results in unreadable notation, Zender claims. The second

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alternative is the method of most microtonal composition, where quartertones, sixth-tones or
eight-tones replace the semitones as the smallest measuring units. Zender is basically critical
towards this approach, which in his opinion involves a risk of reinforcing the abstract
rationalism of the equal temperament. Still this is the alternative he chooses, with the
restriction that the differentiation of the temperament must be done with the aim of capturing
the whole-numbered pitches of the overtone series. The German musicologist Ulrik Mosch
has addressed this dilemma in Zender’s theory. He regards Zender’s technique as a subspecies
of the equal temperament, an “ultra-chromaticism” which can only approximate the “pure”
intervals. But none the less, Mosch appreciates Zender’s theory and approves of Zender’s
pragmatic solution as a significant improvement of the twelve-tone scale.
Through an analysis of how much the different overtones deviate from the equal
temperament, Zender arrives at a subdivision of the semitone, which is measured as a unit of
100 cents in acoustic theory, into six microtonal steps of either 16 or 17 cents. Thus, the
octave is subdivided into a 72- step scale, wherein all the whole-numbered pitches can be
notated with deviations of only 1 to 2, 5 cents. But having been a conductor of modern music
for decades, Zender recognizes the need for a microtonal notation which does not put
prohibitive requirements on the musicians. His solution is to use traditional notation, but to
mark the intervals outside the equal temperament with simple symbols. The notation looks
like this, with the subdivision of the semitone of the equal temperament shown in cents:

According to the composer Frank Gerhardt, Zender’s notation of quartertones with an arrow-
symbol on the note complies with a widespread praxis in microtonal composition, while his
marking of the two subdivisions of the quartertone with one or two bracketed minuses or
pluses is inspired by the tradition of specifying the intonation in the instrumental praxis of
strings and wind instruments. This notation is used in most of Zender’s works since the turn
of the millennium, including Music to hear (1998), Bardo (1999/2000) and Mnemosyne
(Hölderlin lesen IV) (2000).
[I would like you to hear a short excerpt from Bardo, a work for cello and orchestra
inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.]

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 However, Zender’s aim in the lecture “Gegenstrebige Harmonik” is not merely to
incorporate the whole-numbered and the equally tempered intervals in the same notation. He
also wanted to find a new way of constructing a correspondence between pitch and harmony,
both vertically and horizontally. His key to achieve this is the principle of ring modulation,
used in electronic music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others. Ring modulation is a
signal-processing effect in electronics which amplifies the two so called combination tones
which are sounding faintly when two tones, called the initial tone and the modulation interval,
are combined. All four tones are defined in relation to an implied root tone, which places the
higher tones in the same overtone spectrum. One of the combination tones, the differential
tone, is deeper than, or placed between the two original tones; its overtone number is the
difference between the overtone number of the initial tone and the modulation interval. The
other combination tone, the summation tone, is always higher; its overtone number is the sum
of the overtone numbers of the two original tones. Thus, each harmonic interval produces a
four-part harmony, which is only faintly audible in normal acoustics, but which is amplified in
the electronic technique of ring modulation:

DIAGRAM av overtonerekke også, med numre?

Zender uses this process as a harmonic principle, which guides both vertical and horizontal
composition. The combination tones are whole-numbered pitches which are almost always to
be found between the pitches of the equal temperament, so Zender’s 72-step scale is greatly
facilitating the notation of these harmonies. Because of the four part harmony it produces out
of every interval, he calls it “cubistic harmony”.

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 The musical verticality, then, is produced by simulating the process of ring modulation
through calculation of the combination tones, but what about the horizontality? Zender
chooses to develop the linear aspect by a method of modulation tightly connected to the
harmonic simultaneities. He describes a broad variety of techniques within this method, but
the main principle is that one or two of the combination tones in a “cubistic harmony” are
transferred into the position of initial tone or modulation interval, whereby a new four part
harmony is produced. A combination tone is modulated with the initial tone or the
modulation interval, or modulated with a new, “external” pitch. Well to note, the implied root
tone is not constant; it depends on which overtone spectrum the initial tone and the
modulation interval belongs to. Therefore the same pitch will be described with different
overtone numbers during the horizontal modulation. In the chain of modulations which
Zender uses as an illustration in his lecture, the first two chords have C as a root, the third D,
the fourth and fifth A, and the sixth F:

The impression is one of relative continuity, however, because one of the pitches is always
repeated when the chord changes.
Even though Zender’s process of vertical and horizontal modulation may seem quite
constructivist and rule-bound, the imagination of the composer is in fact provided in each step
of the composition. Zender has not designed an overriding set of rules which governs the
movement, but rather a fine meshed net of possible relations between harmonic spectres,
which the composer moves freely within. Of course, other parameters than pitch also has to be
formed, and Zender demonstrates some ways in which one can construct different rhythmic
layers. For instance, by using several pitches simultaneously as initial tone and modulation
interval, there can be derived a plenitude of combination intervals for each harmony, which

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can be realized as quicker line over the slower pace of the initial harmony. In fact, the
rhythmical and polyphonic complexity of the music derived from Zender’s harmonic method
has no obvious limit; the composer’s choice and imagination is decisive. The same can be
said about the complexity - and historical style – of the harmonic language: if the composer
chooses to modulate with intervals which are placed at the bottom of the harmonic spectres,
with low overtone numbers, the harmonic language will be more consonant than if intervals
higher up in the harmonic spectres are used. Modulating with multiple intervals
simultaneously in the higher areas of the spectrums can give results approaching noise, but
Zender claims that these “noise colours” can be subject to a more precise control than earlier
techniques has permitted.

Flexibility and “Gegenstrebigkeit”

Flexibility within the system is crucial for Zender, whose initial motivation for constructing a
harmonic net of relations in the first place, we recall, was to provide a common framework
for the pluralistic confrontation of different musical languages. Zender’s harmonic method
allows for what he has elsewhere termed a “stylistic glissando”—that is, a gradual shifting of
the musical language. It also accommodates two or more styles simultaneously through the
construction of distinct layers in the modulation process; Zender calls this particular kind of
polyphony “polystylistics.” A montage of styles can also be constructed horizontally, by
letting different musical languages follow one another. These kinds of pluralistic montages
have been part of the modern tradition since at least Charles Ives, and, as mentioned earlier,
the pluralism of Bernd Alois Zimmermann was also a crucial influence on Zender’s work.
What distinguishes Zender’s concept of stylistic pluralism within his new gegenstrebige
Harmonik from the pluralism in Zimmermann’s (or his own previous) works is that the
different musical languages all connect to each other structurally via a common harmonic
network.
Zender points out three kinds of Gegenstrebigkeit in his theory of harmony. First, his
theory—in contrast to the hierarchical models of earlier theories—complies with both the
overtone series and the chromatic scale. Second, it specifically engages with the relation
between the spontaneous experience of the acoustic moment and the reflective experience of
temporal structure. Third, it addresses the relation between the mechanistic and the mythic, or
between quantitative and qualitative thinking. Zender’s conclusion to his lecture on harmony,
then, sums up what I have pointed to as his overriding interest in the creative possibilities of
confronting contradictions: “‘Harmony’ thus means the endurance of a maximal tension; in

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the field of logic this tension appears as a contradiction, as a paradox, in the field of artistic
form it is the precondition for the plasticity of the phenomenon.” In this context, harmony is
perhaps best understood as a flexible, subjective phenomenon, synonymous with the
productive attempt to grasp, and assimilate, the experience of tension.
Last year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Hans Zender in Frankfurt. One of my
questions concerned the apparent paradox of constructing a theory of harmony that looks very
much like the kind of defined compositional system that he has used much of his career
reacting against. His answer emphasized the essayistic, flexible nature of the undertaking;

“Yes, you are right, it is a paradox. But it’s a partial system, only for pitches. I do not use a system for the
rhythm, the overall form, or any other aspects. And I try to use this harmonic system in a new way in every
piece, in order to work with different areas of possibility. My system allows one to compose in different stylistic
worlds. The music sounds completely different depending on which intervals you emphasize. So in this
“system”, in quotation marks, there is no fixed stylistic identity. It is only a certain quality of sound, overtone
sound, which is always present, but it allows for the creation of totally different countries of sound. So far, I am
not suffering from this paradox of having a system and being fundamentally anti-systematic.”

Significantly, the paradox is the preferred rhetorical form for the Zen-inspired Zender, and he
often criticizes Adorno and the high modernist composers for their habit of rejecting the
possibility that contradicting theses – or ways of musical thinking – might be valid at the
same time. For Zender, then, neither the high modernist belief in the inevitability of the most
progressive musical language nor the superficial inclusion of all languages in postmodernism
is a fruitful response to the contemporary musical situation.
Regardless of the verdict on Zender’s achievements as a composer, his anti-systematic
system hints to new possibilities for a musical modernism based on multiplicity. Strategically
positioned as a third way between the more dominant, but also more unilateral, approaches of
Lachenmann and Ferneyhough, Zender’s paradoxical anti-system might very well offer an
antidote to the incessant threat of the reification of music.

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