‘Everyone will be waiting for a melody, and I will of course disappoint them all!’, Helmut Lachenmann said with a grin at the 2018 premiere of My Melodies. Indeed, this mammoth piece contains scant melody in the traditional sense. Pithy cells – scraps of fragments of melody – pepper the orchestral texture, cavorting and twisting in a multi layered dialogue. Stray patterns bump up alongside toneless whispers and scrapes. But a full-blooded, tubthumping tune? No chance.

And, for those who know Lachenmann’s music, no surprise. My Melodies conforms to the arch-modernist’s head-spinning compositional ethos: what he calls ‘Musique concrète instrumentale’ – a rich exploration of the universe of sound-making, from pitchless noise through to recognisable note. Here, the conditions under which a sound is made – the forces and materials involved, the ‘concrete’ situation – are as important as the result. For Lachenmann, it’s about new hearing, rather than new sounds. And so, in this case, the titular ‘melodies’ represent his creative handling of the means of sound.

This is best exhibited in the eight-strong horn section, which, though firmly integrated into the orchestral texture, provides a focal point for Lachenmann’s sound-making experiments (the work is subtitled ‘Music for Eight Horns and Orchestra’). For long stretches the horns work together as a single ‘macro horn’, emerging soloistically from the throng, exploring novel chords and tone colours ‘like one instrument in constant microtonal fluctuation’, explains Carsten Carey Duffin, First Principal Horn of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, which premiered the work in 2018.

This idea came to Lachenmann during a 2008 rehearsal of his opera The Little Match Girl: ‘There was only a partial rehearsal with the [eight] horn players. And that sounded so beautiful – more beautiful than the entire opera. Then I thought: ‘This is a new device!’ Following a long gestation period, he began writing the piece in 2016 and, after workshopping ideas with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO) horn section, gleefully reworked it to incorporate his learnings. These include a stunning range of ‘extended’ techniques, from microtones and flutter-tonguing to the reinsertion (upside down) of the mouthpiece. Even the individual valves are removed, blown through and struck. Lachenmann was so taken with the horn’s compositional potential that, ahead of a 2023 performance of My Melodies for the BRSO concert series musica viva, he added another 77 bars.

The definitive work, with its reams of detail and staggering demands – for both performer and listener – is Lachenmann to a tee. And, as with all his pieces, every moment of My Melodies presents a new and fascinating sound experience, a spotlight on the aesthetic potential of previously unloved sounds, a challenge to long-held perceptions of beauty.

Helmut Lachenmann

Helmut Lachenmann is one of several key composers associated with the Darmstadt summer courses during the mid-20th century. He initially studied piano, theory and counterpoint in his hometown of Stuttgart. But, like his near contemporaries Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen, his experience at Darmstadt – then the heart of European new music – gave him a profound sense of the redundancy of previous styles and the need to find some new form of musical expression amid the cultural (and physical) rubble of the post-war years.

It was also at Darmstadt that Lachenmann met the Italian composer Luigi Nono, who became a vitally important mentor. Nono’s teaching, and insistence on a critical, reflective approach, led Lachenmann to develop his explosive musical style, embodied in the phrase ‘Musique concrète instrumentale’. Here, the emphasis is placed not just on a sound’s resultant tone or timbre, but also on the ‘concrete’ conditions under which that sound is made – the materials, forces and resistance encountered. By composing music with a staggering array of sounds, from pitchless noise through to recognisable tones, Lachenmann encourages both performer and audience to embrace a new, speculative form of listening, one that challenges traditional concepts of beauty, free from taste-controlling systems or ideologies.

Early works to explore this approach include: 1968’s temA, for flute, mezzo-soprano and cello; so-called ‘botanical experiments’ Pression (1969–70, for solo cello) and Gran torso (1971–72, for string quartet). From the mid 1970s, Lachenmann’s output turned more deliberately towards the institution of classical music itself. Accanto for clarinet and orchestra (1975), for example, features a continuously played tape of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the restless urgency of the live instruments acting as a foil to the commercial, chocolate-box version of Mozart peddled by ‘establishment’ institutions. His ‘theatre music’ The Little Match Girl (1988–96), based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, wraps all these ideas up into an operatic magnum opus, and has confirmed his status as a grandee of musical modernism

Read the full programme note and profile on the London Symphony Orchestra website