As a consequence of the deliberations sketched above, I have imposed several limi-tations to the composition of this piece. The intervention that will take place on stage will also happen in the written music, that is to say, in the parts of Johannes Brahms’ clarinet trio.58 I will work with the Brahms-notes as found, physical objects (more on which later), and in addition to my own musical imaginations, I will imple-ment a specific material from a newer layer of music history: Helmut Lachenmann’s 1987 clarinet trio Allegro Sostenuto.59 This choice has two functions: First, to try to show the historical roots of material with which I (along with a majority of present-day composers) work: namely the use of noise sounds and ‘new’ playing techniques on classical instruments. Helmut Lachenmann was a pioneer in developing what he called ‘musique concrète instrumentale’. Now that this has become part of the global lingua franca of new music (as I argue in ‘Critical Music?’) it is easy to forget that it has roots in a very specific context and a specific artistic and political environ-ment.xxiii When I use these techniques and superimpose them on Brahms I want to
xxi Consider a remark writer David Foster Wallace gave in an interview where he defined an ‘anas-thesia of form’ with regard to the security and ‘tranquilizing flow’ of ‘Big-R’ traditional realist fiction.
(Interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2, 1993, p. 138) It might be the same anasthetic tranquillity that I try to disrupt (or at least challenge) in this chamber music work.
xxii In ‘Whatever Happened to Postmodernism’, Hal Foster refers to paranoia as ‘the last refuge of the subject threatened by alterity and technology’, which has different implications than the more technical use of the paranoic energies deducted from Dalí by way of Koolhaas. (See Return of the Real, pp. 222–226) xxiii Emerging in the sixties’ and seventies’ Germany, Lachenman belonged to the radical movement and was engaged in several heavy-handed polemics with conservative composers like Henze, who coined his work ‘musica negativa’.
acknowledge that they are historical objects too, instead of pretending that these techniques are ‘neutral’ and without semantic implications. This leads to the second function, which is to point to the question: what is historical music? How does the difference in historicity between a piece from 1891 and one from 1987 manifest itself? Can a 25-year old piece be new music? Is Brahms more historical now, in 2012, than Lachenmann?
I am not trying to answer this question explicitly in the work, but rather show how a parallactic repositioning, an altered point of view in the present, can offer differ-ent constellations of historical objects. (As opposed to the perspective, which is based on a fixed distance between the eye and the object and is a precondition in most renderings of history.) In the following, I’ll try to expound a little on the impli-cations of bringing Lachenmann into the situation. What happens is something I like to think about as a crisis in the work. The Lachenmann-material, implicit in the techniques used to infiltrate the Brahms piece, is suddenly made explicit. Not as something posed from the outside, but as emergent from within the music itself.
Although I extract bars 365–369 from Allegro Sostenuto and transplant them into the coda of Klarinetten-Trio’s first movement, I insist that this represents something emergent in those Brahms-bars, that Lachenmann’s gestures are in fact an estranged version of Brahms floral gestures in the coda. In other words, I detect a similarity that it is probably not, however vague, a coincidence, and I make Lachenmann’s hidden reference explicit by, as it were, ‘uncovering’ it. (I use a similar device, also activating the Lachen-Brahms axis, in Standing Stones. Here I speculate on a hidden connection between a certain portion of Lachenmann’s piano concerto Ausklang60 and the third movement of Brahms’ second piano concerto.)61 I theorize that Lachenmann’s material, however novel, also represents a repetition or rather a return. That under his typologic/topologic grid of sounds and shapes the classical system of how sound moves in time and space is still active, sometimes even on the level of pitch and time. In terms of historicity, I’d like to see this in terms of Foster’s comparison of the institution of art and a subjective entity;62 with the psychic tem-porality of the subject being different from the biological temtem-porality of body, it allows for temporal displacements like the ones of the ‘material’ shared by Lachenmann and Brahms.xxiv It also suggests the possibility to connect (or
re-con-xxiv If I should be mistaken in my identification of these Lachenmann and Brahms-passages, it could be interpreted as an instance of ‘bad combinations’, something that, in the words of artist Sam Durant offers spaces for associative interpretation (see Hal Foster: ‘An Archival Impulse’, October 110). In other words, not so far from my starting point in the paranoid critical method (maybe, in a Freudian sense, even a paranoic projection of meaning onto a world that is drained of it … )
nect) seemingly disparate temporalities as an act of resistance to the ubiquitous not-so-subversive-anymore postmodern strategies of allegorical fragmentation.
The orders of this process are emergent, as orders of associative interpretation, and not formally or ideologically premeditated.
So I propose a dialectic between the two musical surfaces, between the fragmented topology and the smooth flow. In the first movement the relation is antithetic, by techniques of filtering and shifting, where the ‘new’ sound objects are inserted into and disrupting the Brahmsian flow. In the second movement, this relationship becomes one of superpositioning, when the sound objects actually mutate with the flow of time and become the musical time. This process is intensified in the third movement when electronic equipment is brought to the stage to modulate and distort the original musical ‘text’. The two materials are annihilated in the brief fourth movement, when the opposing energies are (falsely) resolved in a topology where the historicity of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ material is evident when they are placed on the same surface as uprooted and de-contextualized samples.
I regard this process as parallactic, moving from a point of listening where his-torical distance is at the forefront to one where I can hear the sound objects as aligned in the (seemingly) same historical time-space. (By the same token, our per-ception of Lachenmann changes when we listen to him not from a point of revolu-tionary high modernism but listen with a view of displacement, dialogue and a sensualist preoccupation of sound.) With this in mind, paranoia, authorship, situa-tion, parallax and all, it has been interesting to meditate on what title this piece should have. I advocate that it is not an act of interpretation or interpretational composition in Hans Zender’s sense. (See for instance Håvard Enge on Zender’s recompositions of Schubert and Schumann.)63 If it is an interpretation, it is of the chamber music performance as such, not of Brahms’ score. The score is of course not randomly chosen, but it is first and foremost a conduit to get in touch with the energies and expectations surrounding a classical chamber music performance.
Rather than being my interpretation of a Brahms piece, it is a new piece staging the intervention of a Brahms-performance. Hence, my piece is entitled Johannes Brahms Klarinetten-Trio.64