Salut für Caudwell

The typical aura attached to the guitar as a folk and art instrument encompasses the primitive as well as the highly sensitive, intimate, and collective. It also includes aspects that can be precisely described in historical, geographical and sociological terms. These expressive potentials are available from the start; but for a composer, the problem is not to use them or even desperately to ward them off, but rather to incorporate them among the musical resources chosen, while simultaneously allowing them to be incorporated into oneself. With this in mind, I began with typical modes of playing the guitar, simplifying techniques but also reshaping and developing them, often beyond the limits that had been set by a practice that revolved around this aura. While composing — or, more precisely, while conceiving and refining relationships between sound and movement — I constantly had the feeling that this music was “accompanying” something; if not a text, then isolated words or thoughts: things, at least, that should be considered but cannot be expressed in words, because we live in a largely speechless society in which nuanced communication has been rendered useless by media excesses and the ruthless manipulation of emotions. This is suggested by the inclusion of spoken words deriving from Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry by the English Marxist poet and author Christopher Caudwell, who, exactly forty years ago, died in Spain at the age of thirty alongside those who attempted to stop the Franco regime. Caudwell’s aesthetics demands an art that is becoming conscious of its causality and expresses this in the name of a kind of freedom that encourages people to confront reality truthfully, with all its multi-layered contradictions, instead of sticking their heads in the sand or taking refuge in private idylls. Caudwell’s thinking — which, to this day, has been deliberately ignored by his own political kindred spirits — also requires rejecting those who enable this politicized concept of art and freedom to be further degraded by forcing it into a Procrustean bed of ideological doctrines that have been revealed, meanwhile, to be essentially pretexts for new forms of oppression. This piece is dedicated to him and to all outsiders who, because they interfere with mindlessness, are quickly branded as destructive. Helmut Lachenmann, 1977 (translation: Seth F. Josel)