Helmut Lachenmann (1935-Present)

Introduction
Helmut Lachenmann is a german composer who was born in Stuttgart in 1935. His music utilizes unique playing techniques that dive into the concept of utilizing new and unknown textures. He studied with Luigi Nono at Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst Stuttgart. After his school he worked all over not only teaching, but creating revolutionary works in the process.

Work Analysis
The piece i wanted to go into was Guero. Guero is a piece for piano but not in the traditional way you think of a piano piece. The Guero is another musical instrument that is a wooden scraper. This specific piece is using the piano to make it sound like this small wooden instrument. It is a very interesting listen. The notation for the piece is an odd combo of what we see as percussion notation but with the pitched aspect of regular music notation where the specific notes are placed higher or lower depending on where they are played. The notation is showing how to play the specific instrument. The piano keys are not used at all in this piece, all of the sound is coming from the strings or other parts of the piano being hit, plucked, and pounded on. There is little to no discernible form in this piece, the only thing that stays the same throughout is the repetition of some of the arcs in the composition.

Comparisons
I want to compare this specific piece to The Rite of Spring. When Stravinsky premiered The Rite of Spring, it was a kind of thinking about music that had never truly been fleshed out. This happens yet again here with Lachenmann. Lachenmann is using instruments in a way no one would ever have thought to use them. Not only is he doing that, but he is also notating the noises created by this seemingly new instrumental texture. It also relates to John Cage's music due the nature of utilizing noises in order to create a composition. The legacy of this piece is the idea of thinking outside the box when it comes to using an instrument, this idea might have just led to using the voice as percussion like many beatboxers do today.

Observations
I think that I enjoyed this piece. It was revolutionary in its own way but did that revolutionizing of sound in a quick manner and was able to fully flesh out the idea of using a piano as a Guero in 5 minutes in total. I think this piece gave me a certain appreciation for the amount of innovation that occurs in the 20th century. Thinking outside the box is what has led to a lot of things we know and love in music today and if it wasn't for simplistic studies of how music and instruments work we would still be thinking of music in the simple terms of the times before the 20th century.