The typical aura attached to the guitar as a folk and art instrument encompasses the primitive as well as the highly sensitive, intimate, and collective. It also includes aspects that can be precisely described in historical, geographical and sociological terms. These expressive potentials are available from the start; but for a composer, the problem is not to use them or even desperately to ward them off, but rather to incorporate them among the musical resources chosen, while simultaneously allowing them to be incorporated into oneself.
With this in mind, I began with typical modes of playing the guitar, simplifying techniques but also reshaping and developing them, often beyond the limits that had been set by a practice that revolved around this aura.

While composing — or, more precisely, while conceiving and refining relationships between sound and movement — I constantly had the feeling that this music was “accompanying” something; if not a text, then isolated words or thoughts: things, at least, that should be considered but cannot be expressed in words, because we live in a largely speechless society in which nuanced communication has been rendered useless by media excesses and the ruthless manipulation of emotions.
This is suggested by the inclusion of spoken words deriving from Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry by the English Marxist poet and author Christopher Caudwell, who, exactly forty years ago, died in Spain at the age of thirty alongside those who attempted to stop the Franco regime.

Caudwell’s aesthetics demands an art that is becoming conscious of its causality and expresses this in the name of a kind of freedom that encourages people to confront reality truthfully, with all its multi-layered contradictions, instead of sticking their heads in the sand or taking refuge in private idylls. Caudwell’s thinking — which, to this day, has been deliberately ignored by his own political kindred spirits — also requires rejecting those who enable this politicized concept of art and freedom to be further degraded by forcing it into a Procrustean bed of ideological doctrines that have been revealed, meanwhile, to be essentially pretexts for new forms of oppression. This piece is dedicated to him and to all outsiders who, because they interfere with mindlessness, are quickly branded as destructive.

Helmut Lachenmann, 1977 (translation: Seth F. Josel)


CDs/LP:
Christopher Brandt, Robin Hoffmann
CD Cadenza 800 875
Wilhelm Bruck, Theodor Ross
CD col legno 0647 277
Norio Sato, Kei Koh
CD ALM-Records ALCD 53
Christopher Brandt, Robin Hoffmann
CD Foxfire, Cadenza 800875, Vertrieb: Note 1
Wilhelm Bruck, Theodor Ross
LP col legno 5504
Barbara Romen, Gunter Schneider (guitar)
CD DURIAN 018-2
Mats Scheidegger und Stephan Schmidt (guitar)
CD Musiques Suisses MGB CTS-M 90
Wilhelm Bruck und Theodor Ross (guitar)
CD KAIROS 0012652KAI


Bibliography:

Downs, Benjamin: Late Serialism in Early Lachenmann, in: Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Nr. 30 (April 2017), pp. 25-31.
Dyer, Mark: Helmut Lachenmann’s „Salut für Caudwell“: An Analysis, in: Tempo 70 (2016), Heft 277, pp. 34-46.
Josel, Seth: „Form can wait“. Zur Form von Lachenmanns “Salut für Caudwell”, in: Musik & Ästhetik, Heft 85 (Januar 2018), pp. 27-44.
„quasi Flamenco da lontano“ … Helmut Lachenmann im Gespräch über „Salut für Caudwell“ (mit Seth Josel), in: MusikTexte Heft 161 (Mai 2019), S. 43-48
Lück, Hartmut: Philosophie und Literatur im Werk von Helmut Lachenmann, in: Der Atem des Wanderers. Der Komponist Helmut Lachenmann, hrsg. von Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Mainz: Schott 2006, pp. 41-55.
Schick, Tobias Eduard: Weltbezüge in der Musik Mathias Spahlingers (Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, Band 80), Stuttgart; Franz Steiner 2018, dort pp. 105-109.
Schneider, Gunter: Die Gitarre in der Neuen Musik. Streifzüge und Momentaufnahmen, in: spuren, Zeitung des Festivals Klangspuren Schwaz, 2. Ausgabe September 2005, p. 4f.