NEW YORK — Forgetting everything you think you know about music is theoretically impossible but was much less so at Helmut Lachenmann: Complete String Quartets, a 90th-birthday celebration at the Miller Theater on Oct. 9. The JACK Quartet played the composer’s three works in that medium, facing extended techniques that produced grinding, scraping, squeaking, and the occasional densely packed chord. Plus silence, and lots of it. Too bad Lachenmann, who turns 90 on Nov. 27 and is often regarded as a paragon of German modernism, wasn’t in attendance: The utterly absorbed, student-age audience at this Columbia University venue hung on every sound — and lack of it.
That attentiveness can partly be explained by the simultaneous heightening of anticipation and the dissolution of it. Once one is in the thick of a Lachenmann quartet, incredulity sets in. Each sound follows another with nothing resembling traditional logic. And rarely do these quartets seem proportioned with the typical beginning, middle, and end. Soon, though, that incredulity becomes normalized. Whether one enjoys this kind of achievement, it’s definitely to be admired. “Thank God it’s not music, “ declared Rossini upon reading through Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Lachenmann might’ve taken that as a compliment.
The JACK Quartet grabbed the challenge, bringing off each of the three quartets with a concentration and resourcefulness that shouldn’t be astounding to anyone who has followed this group. But the playing, cognitively and technically, was on a new level from what I’ve heard from the group over the years. The program-note interview with JACK violinist Christopher Otto threw my ears a life preserver. Otto’s journey into Lachenmann had much initial bafflement, although one didn’t feel left in the dust. The scores are built from alternative notation, all being so intricate and singular that you wondered why the composer didn’t simply realize his vision electronically. Must musicians be forced to learn such a foreign language to recreate the composer’s meticulously sculpted sounds? Well, this music wants to communicate and requires a live presence to do so.
The program was arranged as follows: The 2001 String Quartet No. 3 (Grido, or Scream), the 1971 String Quartet No. 1 (Grand Torso), and the 1989 String Quartet No. 2 (Round Dance of the Blessed Spirits). Beginning the concert with the most recent piece was smart: The composer’s trajectory went from radical experimentation to consolidation, the third quartet being a work where Lachenmann meets the existing music world, maybe not halfway, but close. It’s the only one of the three that truly registers on a recording, aided by a momentum and continuity that comes with slashes of sound traded among the four instruments. Silence, relatively brief in Lachenmann terms, offers contemplation time and avoids ear-alienating congestion.
The range of sounds includes high, extremely quiet notes but also buzzing low-register cello lines that you might’ve heard when your television was giving up the ghost. Any sense of harmonic resolution isn’t on the table. It’s all about motion, in what seems to be a refraction of the landscape that urban dwellers walk through on a daily basis. One other distinction: String Quartet No. 3 has a sense of conclusion with a button that’s coloristically foreign to everything that has come before it.
Skipping back to String Quartet No. 1, the piece is spare even by Lachenmann’s standards, eventually ascending into silence about two-thirds of the way through. Ascending, rather than lapsing? Yes. Some musicians claim that music is not sound, that sound is only the most outward manifestation of that entity known as music. So it was here, but not John Cage-ish silence that encompasses anything in earshot.
Sound was implied as one of the players began going through the motions but not making sound. Other members of the quartet joined in — moving without actually playing. To me, this was yet another level of creating anticipation for what happens next. How long would the silence last? This is one way Lachenmann defies being recorded. When listening to the latest recorded outing by the Quatuor Diotima, I thought the sound file was corrupted. After the JACK performance, one listener observed that even a video wouldn’t capture the real-time quality of that anticipation. The audience, incidentally, was dead silent.
Quartet No. 2, which concluded the concert, would seem to be perversely subtitled Round Dance of the Blessed Spirits after a section from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (a work that was probably as revolutionary in its own time as Lachenmann is in his). But soon into the piece, the filigree string lines sliding from register to register suggested spider webs, though without typical coherence but conjuring up delicate, otherworldly images. About halfway through, the piece entered a region of sound for which I had no context.
Seasoned ears know that even the most forward-looking electronic pieces seem to have a basic point of reference in known sound. Not in these string quartets. Lachenmann and, of course, the JACK Quartet, wiped clean all that I’ve heard over the decades, temporarily relieving me of the burden of anticipation. What comes next is what comes next. Does all of this add up to him being a modernist? Not to me. He’s a composer with a highly specific way of creating music and taking that as far as he could.
