Contemporary Music Review, 9 1995 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH

1995, Vol. 12, Part 1, pp. 93-102 Printed in Malaysia

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On Structuralism
Helmut Lachenmann ~

This article is a kind of appeal for an a p p r o a c h to composition to be a d o p t e d which

p e r h a p s could provisionally be called "dialectical structuralism". It differs from
other approaches as follows: firstly it is distinct from the sort of composition which
dons a " p o s t m o d e r n " or " n e o r o m a n t i c " guise and attempts to exploit not just
traditional music but also the experiences of the so-called " a v a n t - g a r d e " who, with
reference to Sch6nberg a n d Webern, tried to make a n e w start after the Second
World War. By this I m e a n the sort of a p p r o a c h w h e r e b y the aesthetic legacy of the
very m o v e m e n t which is being exploited is at once betrayed and discredited as
being ostensibly a subjection of musical thinking to mere cerebral calculation a n d
as such inimical to expression, h u m a n i t y and music itself. The motto of this
a p p r o a c h is " b a c k to music!" and it claims to be returning "at last" to humanity,
giving e x p r e s s i o n to h u m a n emotions and aspirations b y using off-the-shelf
products from the supermarket of tradition and appealing to the kinds of emotions
w h i c h go d o w n well in a society obsessed with tradition a n d h a v e long since been
subjected to large-scale exploitation b y the commercial music business.
At the same time m y approach to composition can be differentiated from that
taken b y structural mannerists w h o - imitating the serial m e t h o d s of those w h o
believed they were making a clean start after 1945 - still cling to the false belief
that they can take as their point of departure an approach to their material which
is entirely untouched - indeed innocent - of any historical or social influences and
assume a listener w h o is similarly tabula rasa. With unstinted technological
optimism they hope to establish a m e t h o d of composing based on the regulated
interplay of parameters determined purely b y acoustic considerations a n d thus to
create complexity, as it were, in a vacuum, where it disturbs no-one a n d w h e r e a
"disinterested" listener can be impressed b y technological elements as he takes a
detached delight in the sounds.
These current, apparently diametrically o p p o s e d approaches to the technique of
composition are, in m y opinion, merely two sides of the same coin. Both are
continually forming alliances with each other - consciously and frequently also
unconsciously. Both are only too quick to come to an a r r a n g e m e n t with society -
and b o t h prove corruptible w h e n society rushes to come to an a r r a n g e m e n t with
them. H o w e v e r busily they take advantage of the culture business - a n d allow
themselves to be taken advantage of by it - they both e m b o d y the same stagnation
in which n e w music finds itself and which each one of us has to tackle both
inwardly and outwardly if we wish to avoid paralysis.

" This text is a revised and extended version of talks which the author gave in various forms in
1989 at the "'Nordlyd" Festival in Oslo and in 1990 at a colloquium entitled "Musikgeschichte:
gedoppelt - geteilt" organised by the Akademie der K(inste in Berlin, at a symposium "'Musikkultur
in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" in Leningrad, and at the Composers" Forum staged as part of
the Darmstadt holiday courses.
93
94 H. Lachenmann

It is generally accepted that during the fifties - the period of reconstruction in

Europe after the "catastrophe" - it was the structuralist approach which opened
up new avenues and new perspectives for composition. Only with the help of this
approach did music finally shake off the stale, implausible, anachronistic,
dissonant, murky rhetorical insistency of the tonal idiom which had come between
listener and sounds. Music abandoned its attempts to be a language and came out
in its true colours as a non-linguistic structure which is nevertheless eloquent and
capable of expression in an uncomfortably indirect manner. On the assumption -
which we now recognise to have been spurious - that they were making a clean
start, they rejected out of hand the current concept of music, completely rethought
musical material and, starting from the fundamental physical nature of sound and
time, developed rules and relationships based on these which enabled them to
reformulate the very idea of musical material and create an awareness that it had
to be constantly reformulated anew.
The methods which were developed were largely serial in nature and were
based on the measurable characteristics of sound reduced to its acoustic evidence
(and thus apparently freed from all the bourgeois intentions and connotations
attached to it). Virtually every composer involved in this development prepared
his work by determining the parameters and creating serial sequences as the basis
for a system of rules or a process of sampling from the continuum of time and
sound.
Thus music from this period aimed to do something more radical than just
making people aware of structure rather than "expression". It made its own,
newly-established concept of material the object of the process of compositional
invention. Music began to think about itself in a new way.
In a certain sense every work that emerged from this period constituted its own
syntactical model. As a product of practical compositional reflection about itself in
a very specific historical context, music became, in the last analysis, expressive
again - though in an uncomfortable way - and began to suggest, in a new and
unusual sense, a consciousness drastically at odds with what music had meant in
the past and could mean in the future. The expectations attached to this
structuralist approach ranged from magical utopias via a sensual, almost botanical
pleasure in discovery, to hopeful anticipation of the emergence of a new,
authoritative, musical language and a correspondingly progressive reception
culture in a society which appeared to be ready to undergo radical self-renewal
after the catastrophes it had just experienced.
These expectations were encouraged and supported, and the compositional
process influenced, by the example of the Viennese School - which had been
newly rediscovered after a long period of suppression - by technological
developments in all areas of life, by the encounter of European thinking with other
cultures, and by an intellectual exchange with other fields in the natural and social
sciences which were also undergoing radical upheavals.
Society, however, did not go along with this. As Europe recovered during the
post-war period, people's consciousness in all areas started to revert to the old
bourgeois value systems and taboos, and is still clinging to these, particularly in the
area of aesthetic experience, well aware of the real threat to our time and our
civilisation. This gives us the same illusion of security as an ostrich creates by
sticking its head into the sand.
 On Structuralism 95

Thus the worlds of the avant-garde and the view of art conveyed by them,
represented not so much a liberating as a disturbing experience for the public at
large. Disturbing firstly because it offered an experience of the radical break with
the traditions which the public had monopolized. (In actual fact it was a break with
the bourgeois abuse of these traditions, but was perceived as merely negative and
destructive); and secondly because it involved a new departure into the unknown,
into an uncertain and threatening world which in reality consisted merely of new,
unfamiliar areas of their o w n selves.
The development of music at the latest since the 60s - i.e. since the appearance
of the "second generation" represented b y names like Ligeti, Penderecki, the
Polish School, Kagel, Schnebel - and also Berio - is the story of a poorly handled
and ultimately bungled confrontation with society's tendency to suppress and at
the same time embrace all that is challenging and awkward. It is the story of a
regression which, though initially hidden and unconscious, increasingly revealed
itself for what it was. At the same time, in that it was an attempt to break out of
the intellectual rigidity of academic serialism, it did contain certain progressive
elements which opened up n e w perspectives. This break with what had originally
been such narrowly interpreted parameters led not just to the inclusion of new
categories of experience, but also to a return - for whatever reasons - to pre-serial
topoi, gestures, tonal relics and fragments in the widest sense, which had already
proved their expressive qualities and as such had been "socialised". While these
were certainly viewed in a new light, this was done in such a way that the
nostalgic evocation of this material actually led increasingly to the re-establishment
of the old aesthetic code which Adorno once small-mindedly objected to - apropos
of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto - as "'a relic of the N e w G e r m a n School".
The music of the 60s continually flirted - in a different way - with its originally
involuntary role of scourge of the bourgeoisie. It began to perceive itself as a
surreal monster, and as such was largely tolerated and subsidised by the
"progressive" bourgeois culture business. Music was experienced - or tolerated -
as an alien and "dissonant" shock, as an object of masochistic fascination for an
audience whose attachment to traditional h a r m o n y remained unaffected.
Over the past 15 years at least this secret regression has come out into the open.
People are n o w openly declaring their allegiance to the old repertoire of emotions,
or to that sort of " h a r m o n y " which consists of arranging the conventional tonal
consonances and serving them up as a genuine, indeed h u m a n e and listener-
friendly alternative to the "arrogance" of yesterday's avant-garde.
I myself have no fear whatsoever of coming into contact with such trends. I like
to think that I understand them and recognise that there is a dialectic of
progression and regression which can be stronger than any progressive yearnings
to be a pioneer. I have expressed m y views on such trends in m y essay of 1981
entitled "Affekt u n d Aspekt".
In contrast to this there are those who still have a sort of dogged faith in
progress and - encouraged amongst other things by the technological develop-
ments of recent years - see the only way forward as being a dogma of serial
structuralism with the old parameter-based rigour and blind syntactic logic of
rule-governed thinking. They cling to - or newly embrace - this approach, and
seem to expect that the ivory tower they have constructed is of such technical
fascination that society will beat a way to its door.
96 H. Lachenmann

This attitude deserves respect, inasmuch as it differs from the trends described
above by denying the access which the "communicative" (in the bourgeois-
romantic sense) seems to assume it has a right to, and by generating regulatory
structures based on laws which are free of any direct subjective intentions.
But such thinking is not enough for me. It means that at a time w h e n technology
itself is exploiting regressive illusions in a thousand different ways, the "commu-
nicative" (in the bourgeois-romantic sense), instead of mounting the podium in an
emotional and expressive manner, is sitting d o w n in a sort of hidden command
centre from which it determines and manipulates the rules for whatever
sound-patterns and sound worlds it likes, and b y doing so is merely once again
asserting the old spirit for which such structuralism plays a role which is merely
"interesting", "imaginative", surrealistic, exotic - and sometimes even pleasantly
decorative. Thus a basically reactionary culture which is adept at using a highly
sophisticated system for integrating (i.e. suppressing) everything which disturbs it
- especially in art - includes in its collection of curios an innocent neo-
structuralism which is clearly quite at ease with itself, blissfully unaware of the
pitfalls which such laziness brings and fatally believes that it is as intact as the
self-deluding culture within which it operates.
It seems to me that the "'radicalism" with which this kind of structuralism
subjects compositional decisions to the authority of pre-set rules and projection
mechanisms in the context of an empty and unresisting concept of complexity and
uses the musical material as something one can determine and deploy quantitively
is a rather too comfortable approach to progressive structural thinking. This belief
that the creative process can be basically formalised is naive. It is based - at best
- on a fetishisation of what can be "'obviously" measured and quantified, and is
relatively indifferent towards all those factors which have always affected musical
events and which are derived from sources other than structures determinable on
micro or macro timescales.
This represents a misinterpretation of the serial procedures and that original
"tabula rasa" approach of the early avant-garde in a way that hardly any of the
original protagonists of serialism can have had in mind. And with all due respect
to the manifold refinements and no doubt very interesting creations cultivated in
such hothouses, I find here in the last analysis the same stagnation which I have
already diagnosed from quite different symptoms.
To me this sort of structural mannerism 1 ignores and betrays those aspects
which made "classical" structuralism and its precursors in the Viennese School so
explosive. In today's different historical situation they should belong - whatever
changed form they may take - to the rigour of composition. I am referring to the
element of specific negation, of radical departure, or a radical syntactical design
which has become form, the result of reflection on what music in a specific
historical social situation can still be.
(Not to mention the fact that its apparently expressively empty, "liberated"
products can be effortlessly imbued retrospectively with any bourgeois clich6 of
expression and constantly fall into the trap of allowing themselves to be distorted
by entering into alliances with the bourgeois cult of curiosities and emotions. I am

1 This is not an a priori attack on mannerism as an art form in cases where it re-transcends
structuralist techniques. As an artistic phenomenon someone like Brian Ferneyhough undeniably
stands head and shoulders above his - and other - imitators as regards innovative potential.
 On Structuralism 97

sometimes amazed h o w m a n y apparently purely structuralist works allow

themselves to be subjected to a reception code derived from the late-romantic cult
of genius, and do so with almost as few inhibitions as the neo-romantics, h o w e v e r
different these two approaches m a y be in other respects).
In fact, a study of works from the "classical" period of serialism, such as the
"Canto Sospeso" or "'Incontri" by Luigi Nono, "Structures" or "'Marteau" by
Boulez, "Gruppen'" or "'Kontrapunkte" by Stockhausen, reveals that the "com-
pelling quality" of this music is not just derived from the virtuous consistency with
which the self-imposed rules are adhered to -and work - but also at least as much
from the wisdom with which the music, even with the aid of such a system of
rules - and in dialectical contact with it - constitutes a reaction to existing social
structures and the existing communicative rules of the bourgeois aesthetic
apparatus they have created, and offers them resistance - not just rhetorical but
actual - putting their normal functioning out of action, indeed sometimes even
destroying it.
It was this resistance to the established which constituted the strength of these
revolutionary aesthetic outbursts and accounted for the beauty of these works at
a time w h e n the traditional concept of " b e a u t y " was regarded as highly suspect by
most of these composers.
It was not least with this in mind that 15 years ago I defined " b e a u t y " as
"rejection of habit". In the early 60s I had developed a sort of typology of sounds
which took as its point of departure the purely physically determined (however
unrealistic this may be) acoustic perception of individual sounds - and culminated
in "structural sound" or, conversely, " s o u n d structure". Structure as a dialectical
object of perception, inasmuch as the musical meaning and aural experience of
individual sounds or their elements were not determined just by themselves - i.e.
by their own direct physical characteristics - but by their relationship to their
immediate and wider environment, their affinities, the various roles they played in
a context or hierarchy - whatever form it might take - created by the composer
and for which he assumed responsibility. The result was that in the concept of
"structural sound" the old dualism of sound and form disappeared because the
idea of sound ultimately resulted from the tentative concept of form, and
conversely the idea of form inevitably resulted from the concept of sound.
"Structure" was defined as a " p o l y p h o n y of ordered juxtapositions" - which
embraced the serialists" approach with their gradation and projection of parame-
ters, but was based on the inner dialectic of sound and form, and was thus largely
in keeping with the ideas of the avant-garde, inasmuch as they - as has already
been said - thought in terms of "syntactical" models - which always implies
development, the establishment of an order, sequences a n d their hierarchical
projection in time - and at the same time also the development and extension of
specific sound categories.
(Interestingly enough I was also able to apply this structural model of mine to
every classical work I tried it out on - with very exciting results. On this point see,
for example, m y article on "M6glichkeiten und Schwierigkeiten des H0rens" from
19852.)
It was only later that I deliberately w e n t beyond this purely immanent idea of
structure in m y considerations of the theory of composition as well, by attempting

2 see MusikTexte,July 1985, Vol 10, P. 7 ff

98 H. Lachenmann

to register and group r o u n d the " p u r e " structure of a work those other aspects
which experience tells us shape every single sound and compositional element in
advance "before the composer ever gets near to it".
Four aspects would seem to emerge which contribute to the expressive qualities
of every sound from the very outset and which the composer can - and indeed on
occasion must - ignore, but which, because they are there and automatically have
a strong effect, m a y influence his music and even run contrary to his intentions
(which may often be to the benefit of his composing), so that he has to decide the
extent to which he can, wishes to, or even has to incorporate their characteristics
into his compositional processes and the final shape of his works. These four
aspects are:
a) Tonality - here the concept goes b e y o n d the inner requirements of tonality
and becomes a s y n o n y m for tradition and the aesthetic apparatus which
embodies it.
b) Acoustic-physical experience - i.e. that area which was discussed earlier in
connection with sound typology because it is here that the immanent
compositional speculations of structural composing occur.
c) Structure - not just as an experience of order, organisation, but also as an
experience of disorganisation - an ambivalent product of construction and
destruction (just as a piece of w o o d e n furniture can be related to the tree
which was destroyed in order to make it).
d) Aura - the realm of association, memories, archetypal magical predetermina-
tions.
Where aura and tradition - and the two concepts overlap of course - are involved
in determining the experiential quality of sounds, the material the composer is
supposed to order is no longer easy to measure or regulate. It becomes complex
and unwieldy to an unpredictable degree. This was the step which I should long
since have taken - and indeed had secretly already taken - as could be seen from
m y increasingly careless, indeed refractory handling of algorithmically determined
rules: an extended reflection of the "ordered juxtaposition" element in that
structural concept of a " p o l y p h o n y of ordered juxtapositions" From the very outset
I called these sequences "families". For while the classic serialist model bases its
concept of structure on clearly measurable acoustic characteristics and their
quantified gradations - namely scales - which presupposes clear-cut programmes
for their organisation and (of great importance later on for computer music) clearly
formalised compositional procedures, I found again and again in m y analyses of
other composers' works and in my o w n attempts to draw up structural principles,
that the measurable parameters or the quantitative gradations based on these were
at best only the most primitive variant of what was available in conjunction with
superordinate structures in terms of musical sense units, types of experience and
related sound constellations.
The term "family", on the other hand, though itself a "bourgeois" concept,
allows apparently incompatible sounds and objects to be brought u n d e r one roof
and made into a musical sense-unit - i.e. category of experience - which is thus
defined for the first time. It allows incommensurable elements to be projected on
to a c o m m o n temporal plane.
 On Structuralism 99

For what do a father, mother, son, daughter, household servants, dog and cat
have in c o m m o n except the fact that they all live together under one roof and
together make up a more or less integrated hierarchy? They have little in common
which could be linked in a quantifiable way, but what happens between them is
all the more important: they share a c o m m o n destiny which indirectly affects the
fate of each individual m e m b e r - even though these are not comparable to each
other.
It can h a p p e n in music that such a hierarchy, if it is established from the outset
as a sense-unit, is eventually confronted with other sense-units, subjected to stress
by these, and indeed eventually subverted to the point of dissolution - like what
happens to the theme in the classical sonata.
But it can also h a p p e n that the composer, for reasons he himself is unaware of,
links together apparently incompatible elements because he suspects the existence
of a particular sense-unit, is searching for it, and only discovers it intuitively during
the course of his work.
The link between two sudden sounds cannot lie in that plane of experience
which is measurable in micro- or macro-time. An acoustic straight line in music is
not always the shortest distance between two sounds. Frequently the common
denominator, the bridge, is on a different plane and is often not recognised as
such, or is not articulated, but is felt all the more clearly (see Sch6nberg's remarks
in his writings on h a r m o n y about a sound link in the clarinet works of his pupil
Alban Berg).
In the introduction to his book "The Order of Things", the French philosopher
Michel Foucault makes a well-known reference to a short story by Jorge Luis
Borges in which the latter describes a fictitious "Chinese Encyclopedia" in which
"the animals are classified as follows: a) animals which belong to the emperor, b)
embalmed animals, c) tame animals, d) milk pigs, e) sirens, f) animals in fables, g)
dogs without master, h) those belonging to this group, i) those that behave as
though they were mad, k) those painted with a very fine camel-hair brush, I) and
so on, m) those which have broken the water-jug, n) those which look like flies
from a distance".
This abstruse non-scale of animals tells us little about the hierarchy of animal
species but a lot about the imagination which produced such a classification. As a
composer I constantly find myself in similar situations which challenge me to view
the incommensurable as one unit, for reasons which can be f o u n d in the particular
structure of m y search, i.e. in m y own structure. The form our search takes is part
of ourselves - it cannot easily be regulated from the outside (why should I search
for rules w h e n I have already found their results?). The form of my search is an
expression of m y self.
What is at any rate certain is that whatever sound material we use, we are at the
same time establishing - consciously or unconsciously - the structures from which
this sound or material comes. It is also certain that the structural link to be created
is only effective in terms of musical innovation to the extent that the structures
already invoked are broken and sometimes even destroyed. Creating structures
inevitably means destroying ones that already exist. This m a y happen by chance,
incidentally - in whatever way - but without this element of breaking away from,
specifically negating something which was there before, structuralism as a " n e w
departure" will remain an exotic self-deception. Art must cut through to the bone.
100 H. Lachenmann

This can mean that music derives its structural detail from a conscious-
unconscious confrontation with the structures which it helps to establish, which it
evokes - and at the same time breaks with, clashes with - structures which the
composer may evoke by leaving unmentioned, in order to exorcize them in some
way. This is precisely what is meant by "dialectical structuralism".
What is meant is a way of thinking which cannot just be aimed at the creation,
stipulation or drawing of attention to musical structures, but focuses on where
such structures emerge, take shape and foster awareness of themselves as a result
of the direct and indirect confrontation with existing structures in the material
derived from all areas of experience and existence, all realities, including those
outside the realm of music. Musical structures derive their strength solely from
conscious or unconscious resistance, the friction between them and prevailing
structures of existence and consciousness. Any concept of complexity which
ignores this aspect is meaningless.
To break through prevailing structures affecting the material means releasing,
wrenching, tearing the specific sound elements in these structures from their
existing, apparently self-evident context and allotting them to different, newly-
created categories which the composer has to establish. This means experiencing
the familiar in an unfamiliar context, mobilising, relaunching perception and
making it accessible as an experience. Thus at the heart of this process of
destruction lies "liberated perception." This refers not just to the consciousness of
the acoustic element - though it includes this - but rather the artistic approach to
perception operates dialectically: the quality and the experiential meaning of the
sound changes and defines itself anew within the newly created relational
structures.
There is, however, no such thing as totally free, unconditional perception. But
in the transition from the usual type of listening to this structurally newly
determined perception there is a momentary, essentially incomprehensible flash of
"liberated" perception which at the same time reminds us both of our externally
determined lack of freedom (of which we are unaware) and also of our duty to
overcome this lack of freedom - in other words our powers of imagination.
Liberated perception, dialectical illumination of the material by breaking
through it, and the restructuring of sounds, all form a cycle, and whatever point
composition starts at it has to be aware of the whole.
The C-major third in Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" in the first scene of Act 2 (Da ist
wieder Geld, Marie) is, in the context of Berg's work, an atonal construct, and yet
at the same time it contains its tonal origins as a degraded, broken, ultimately
rejected element. We do not just hear what this sound is n o w - i.e. its quality as
a musical interval within the framework it occurs in - but also what it was and is
no longer. Because of its lost, but well-remembered - here broken - tonal
characteristics it can no longer be merely mechanically integrated into the atonal
context.
The tubular bells in Luigi Nono's "Canti di V i t a e di A m o r e " constitute a form
of what we untidily refer to as "clusters" and reveal themselves to be jangling,
quasi broken metal rods which evoke solemnity and at the same time have an
alienating effect. Where they used to be deployed to have a magical impact they
are n o w experienced anew as structural particles in a sound landscape consisting
of cymbals, tam-tams and clusters of 12-tone intervals from the orchestra. They
thus operate within an overall structure which presents the emphasis which has
 On Structuralism 101

just been shattered as something completely new within changed structural

relationships and different aesthetic conditions.
Where art does not come into contact with the incommensurable in this way,
where it avoids interplay with the unquantifiable, it is dead. But where it risks this
interplay, compositional procedures can no longer be programmed, formalised, just
as the characteristics to be controlled by the composer cannot be quantified or
regulated - with one's hand on the dial as it were.
And only if music offers structures which are experienced dialectically will it
once again constitute that spiritual provocation without which it will be destined
to wither away in the jungle of our culture, civilisation and media.
This element of shattering the familiar by making us aware of and illuminating
its structure creates a situation not just of uncertainty but also of deliberately
created "non-music". This is at the same time an element of crucial importance for
the process of listening, and it is only by allowing oneself to experience this
"'non-music" that listening becomes genuine perception. It is only n o w that one
begins to listen differently, that one is reminded of the changeability of listening
and of aesthetic behaviour, reminded, in other words, of one's own structure,
one's o w n structural changeability and also of the element of h u m a n invariability
which makes all this possible in the first place: the power of what one calls the
h u m a n spirit. Inasmuch as aesthetic and social taboos are affected, subjected to
strain, broken, the experience of music becomes an experience of conflict, a matter
of controversy, and at the same time an opportunity to rediscover oneself. In an
age w h e n culture has become a drug, a sedative, a m e t h o d of suppressing reality
rather than illuminating it, it is no longer possible for there to be responsible art
without such conflict situations - and these must occur spontaneously and should
never deliberately be staged.
The society in which we live is characterised not just by the threats of which it
is well aware but also by the suppression of such threats, and in the aesthetic
sphere by the ability to s u m m o n up cheap, comfortable experiences of exoticism
at the press of a button, an anxiously conjured-up illusion of security in a world
which carefully classifies everything that irritates it as "dissonant", thus failing to
come to terms with it, and enjoying it as an element of spice and excitement in an
approach to experience based on harmonious, bourgeois values. Art has to break
out of this falsely intact world - as it has always done in the past - and this
requires a sensibility which must go well b e y o n d both expressive-speculative and
structuralist games, however symbolic or complex and sophisticated these may be.
The question of the role of the composer today has to be a question of his
responsibility. I see this as being to preserve the concept of emphatic art from
being rendered harmless and commercialized, to preserve it both in and from a
society in which the majority has misunderstood and misused tradition to derive
an idea of "aesthetic enjoyment" as being a quick dose of magic available at the
push of a button, thus putting art to the service of suppression and the
propagation of a false sense of security. It is a society characterised by glib fluency
which it has learned to use to gloss over its actual speechlessness.
The art of listening, which in an age of a daily tidal wave of music is at once
overtaxed and underchallenged, and thus controlled, has to liberate itself by
penetrating the structure of what is heard, by deliberately incorporating, provok-
ing and revealing perception. This seems to me to be the true tradition of western
art.
102 H. Lachenmann

The concept of perception i s more adventurous and more existential than that
of listening. It puts all certainties and predeterminations at risk; it implies a high
degree of intellectual and intuitive sensibility and related intellectual activity which
takes nothing for granted and which does not just experience the object perceived
in its structure, its constituent parts and internal logic - and the spirit which
imbues it - but also tests and perceives his own structure in relation to it.
Creating such situations for individualised, changed and thus liberated percep-
tion does not m e a n depending on and speculating with the old categories of
listening. Nor does it m e a n drifting off into some extra-terrestrial worlds of
listening and material. It cannot m e a n settling in a virgin territory of u n k n o w n
sounds. What it does mean is - again and again - playing Robinson Crusoe on the
devastated desert island of one's own culture, entering into the elemental
adventure of one's own bourgeois self which is just beginning to recognise its old
bondage amongst its own ruins.
Perception thus perceives itself and goes b e y o n d this to perceive also its ability
to penetrate both reality and its o w n structure. Thus it is reminded of its ability to
overcome lack of freedom by recognition and, in doing so, to achieve freedom.
Self-experience, provoked by a creative medium, a creative liberation, then
becomes a spiritual, i.e. "artistic" experience, and vice-versa.
The "emphasis" which has thus been put at stake returns not only cleansed but
also recharged - "rescued". Music only has a sense "insofar as its structures point
b e y o n d themselves to structures - i.e. realities and possibilities - around us and in
ourselves."