On composition and the idea of retrieving the concept of art with reference to society, its "occidentally"-based restrictions, and not least the human need for self-realisation through the creative process.The not entirely unpretentious notion of "retrieval" refers to the dictum pronounced by Karl Kraus, that tireless admonisher and prophet of the "Last Days of Man", which he recognised during the outbreak of the First World War in an ardent protest against the current political and national over-enthusiasm of a warmongering journalism; who in the 1930s, however, upon the Nazis' rise to power, abstained from further "burning" articles, whose futility and helplessness he realised, and saw only a single necessity: to "bring language to safety" in the face of such an all-suffocating barbarism.
This all-suffocating barbarism diagnosed by Kraus was not overcome through the two world wars - on the contrary, it came to infiltrate all areas of life in a fatally harmless guise: as a culture of "Fun" whose universal, cheapened availability gives rise to a rapid devaluation of all that has been precious to us as artistic experience. We are thus today once again faced with the task of bringing art "to safety", even if the word "safety" may initially give us a start.
Helmut Lachenmann -'Philosophy of Composition: Is there such a thing?', translated Wieland Hoban, in
Identity and Difference: Essays on Music, Language and Time (Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004), pp. 55-56.
The term 'culture of "Fun"' was
Spaßkultur, a reasonably common term in recent times in Germany (together with the concomitant
Spaßgesellschaft, see
here). The article has to the best of my knowledge only been published in English translation.
A very acute diagnosis of the situation of new music today.
