Titles of works, like programme notes, are at best misleading a Concertini, raising expectations of a collection of concertante situations, is just such a title. There are indeed soloistic opportunities, for guitar, harp, tuba and others, but also (rather less plausibly and with apologies for the neologism) for all instrument-types of action and articulation. These include a scraping concerto and solos for spatial movement, for resonance, sound sequences, rhythmic patterns (with a reminiscence of my piece Mouvement, whose history is bound up with my friendship with Ensemble Modern).

My 1960s composition was often characterised as instrumental musique concrète, in which the compositional process drew its energy from the physicality of sound entities. However its vitality depended on more than just the defamiliarisation of instrumental sounds. From the beginning I have been concerned not just with noisiness and alienation but with transformation and revelation, with real consonance in the widest sense, so that rhythm, gesture, melody, intervals, harmony – every sound and everything sounding is illuminated by its changed context.

The concertante arrangement allows an ever-shifting balance between accompanying, disguising, covering, uncovering, counterpointing, how and where transformation occurs, every aspect of this ad hoc collection of sound categories: explorers in a self-perpetuating labyrinth, yet fixed in a rigid time-frame; searching an overgrown garden for ...

Helmut Lachenmann
(Trarego, June 7, 2005)


CDs:
Ensemble Modern, cond. Brad Lubman
EMSACD-001
Klangforum Wien, cond. Johannes Kalitzke
CD KAIROS 0012652KAI


Bibliography:

Griffiths, Paul: Modern Music and After, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press 2010, p. 411f.
Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen: Helmut Lachenmann: Concertini, in: Helmut Lachenmann (= Musik-Konzepte 146), München: edition text + kritik 2009, pp. 46-59.
Utz, Christian: Klangkadenz und Himmelsmechanik. Alterität und Selbstreferentialität in Helmut Lachenmanns Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern und Concertini, in: Musik als Wahrnehmungskunst. Untersuchungen zu Kompositionsmethodik und Hörästhetik bei Helmut Lachenmann, hrsg. von Christian Utz und Clemens Gadenstätter (= musik.theorien der gegenwart 2), Saarbrücken: Pfau 2008, pp. 127-154.
ders. und Dieter Kleinrath: Klang und Wahrnehmung bei Varèse, Scelsi und Lachenmann, in: Klangperspektiven, hrsg. von Lukas Haselböck, Hofheim: Wolke 2011, pp. 73-102.