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organize one more minimal music<br />
piece, to exploit the great supermarket<br />
of fascism and add another<br />
nice piece to it - such music<br />
would be replacable.<br />
STEENHUISEN: So it's a rejection<br />
of habit?<br />
LACHENMANN: You could<br />
say it like that. Refusing, maybe.<br />
Balls breaking it, and opening it<br />
It's not a destructive process, but<br />
rather a dec9nstructive process.<br />
When we come to Toronto,. my<br />
wife will play a 30-minute piano<br />
piece of mine. At the premiere,<br />
people expected I would use the<br />
piano strings, or "prepare" the pi<br />
~o. but I didn't. I worked directly<br />
with intervals, and resoriance.<br />
STEENHUISEN: Is this Ein<br />
Kinderspiel?<br />
LACHENMANN:~ Ein Kinderspiel<br />
is another, older piano piece,<br />
and I'll play that one myself when<br />
I'm there. It uses a lot of pre-established<br />
patterns. But it's not really<br />
about the pitches. The music .<br />
is not the pitches.<br />
STEENHUISEN: lW1Gt is. it then?<br />
LACHENMANN: Exactly!<br />
This is the best thing you could<br />
say. Maurice Ravel said "Maybe<br />
Bolero is my best piece, but unfortunately<br />
it doesn't contain any music."<br />
You see, this is the wonderful<br />
question - "What is it then?"<br />
If someone says to me that what I<br />
do isn't music, I say "Wonderful".<br />
.<br />
Finally, we have not music.<br />
The whole world is full of soc<br />
called music. You can't find any<br />
place where you can be away from<br />
it. A train station, an airport, everywhere.<br />
Finally, you make a situation<br />
in which you have to reflect<br />
again, to ask again, "What is music?"<br />
With Ein Kinderspiel, you<br />
hear the chromatic notes from top·<br />
to bottom, but you hear the piano<br />
in a different way. It's a different<br />
instrument now, you hear each key<br />
anew. Each of the seven pieces<br />
uses a different pattern, and the<br />
patterns are totally unmusical - banal<br />
or primitive to such a degree<br />
that you're able to hear what actually<br />
happens in the background of<br />
that sound. And then you hear<br />
resonance in a different way. The<br />
last piece gives, through resonance,<br />
hallucinations or imagined<br />
melodies that the pianist can't even<br />
control, because it comes through<br />
the resonances, which give you<br />
many other lower frequencies. If<br />
it's not music, I'd say it's a situa-<br />
NOVEMBER 1 - DECEMBER 7 <strong>2003</strong><br />
tion of perception, which provokes<br />
you to wonder "What is music?"<br />
For me, this is the deepest experience.<br />
When people first heard<br />
Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie,<br />
they said it wasn't music, and they<br />
were right, because they saw that<br />
it was a completely different way<br />
of moving on, with,the old means.<br />
When Johann Sebastian Bach<br />
wrote ha!Jllonizations of the good<br />
old Lutheran chorales, people said<br />
he should be fired from his post ~at<br />
the church, because he destroyed<br />
their beautiful music, which they<br />
habitually used to pray to God.<br />
They were angry, yet today we are<br />
fascinated by the intensity of these<br />
pieces. These composers changed<br />
the idea of music, and this is our<br />
occidental musical tradition - that<br />
music is changed by the authentic<br />
creative invention of composers.<br />
Look what Beethoven did with the<br />
same sounds used in the more aristocratic<br />
music of Mozart or Haydn.<br />
He used it in another way,<br />
maybe because it was a time of<br />
revolution, maybe because he was<br />
. a little bit crazy. The whole<br />
change of styles and means in. European<br />
music, from the first monodic<br />
music until today, follows<br />
the idea bf destroying the conventional<br />
idea of music.<br />
STEENHUISEN: Do you find<br />
that peif orming your music in a<br />
different geographical context<br />
changes the perception of your<br />
work?.<br />
LACHENMANN: I think so,<br />
yes. It's clear. I had some experience<br />
with this in Japan. I am<br />
totally a European musician.<br />
(laughs) I can't help it. And why<br />
should I, it's okay. But in looking<br />
for other ways of thinking<br />
about time, for instance, or of<br />
sound, my music resonated in a<br />
certain sense with the traditional<br />
Japanese music. Many Japanese<br />
people felt a connection with their<br />
own music that has large timespans,<br />
and some raw elements,<br />
like in Noh theatre, or Gagaku.<br />
had my opera per.formed there ·3<br />
years ago, in Tokyo. And it was<br />
incredible, even for me. It was<br />
like a different piece, because of<br />
the situation. It wasn't the same<br />
as in my home. They are open to<br />
iong time dimensions, which the<br />
Europeans, like many, may have<br />
problems with. They can breathe<br />
with that. The idea of something<br />
being totally simple is in Zen a<br />
very deep idea. I always ask my<br />
students to make the sounds empty.<br />
Every sound is full of expres-
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