Helmut Friedrich Lachenmann is a German composer of contemporary music. In his 1980 work for piano, Child's Play, Lachenmann develops one of his own signature concepts, musique concrète instrumentale, in which he uses the "standard" (not prepared) piano in non-conventional and innovative ways to explore new sounds and techniques. This dissertation is a pedagogical study that provides a teaching guide for educators who would like to use Child's Play as an introduction to some of the sounds and techniques of contemporary music for their late intermediate students. In order for educators to effectively guide their students through Child's Play, they should understand the sonorities of musique concrète instrumentale as well as the extended techniques it requires. This dissertation addresses those needs through three principal means. First, it introduces Lachenmann's musique concrète instrumentale and classifies the various sonorities into three types: descriptive, contrasting, and extended. Second, it analyzes and discusses technical elements in the cycle, including notational considerations, pedaling, and sound effects. Last, the dissertation provides pedagogical suggestions to help students master these technical elements. By studying and playing this piece, students not only become intimately familiar with some of the many sounds they are able to produce on the piano, but they also gain experience in playing contemporary techniques and repertoire and familiarity with nontraditional notation. This study of Lachenmann's Child's Play will provide educators with a guide for teaching this valuable work to their late intermediate students.

This thesis takes the linguistic concept of metonymy and examines its potential as a creative structural principle both in poetry and in music. I explore the role of metonymy in the work of the poet J.H. Prynne, the improvising guitarist Derek Bailey, and the composer Helmut Lachenmann. I have also deployed some of the ideas arising from this exploration in a modular composition for improvisers entitled Representations, recordings of which accompany this thesis. My argument is that metonymy provides a means by which a work of poetry or of music can be highly sensitive to the world which it inhabits, but can do so by itself being an inextricably linked part of this world, rather than an attempt to reproduce or represent it, or to simply pass judgement from the sidelines. In my introduction I outline the literary theory of metonymy. I discuss the way that metonymy encompasses relationships both of contiguity and causality, and make the case that the many limitations inherent in metonymy (which have often led to its being perceived as inferior to metaphor) can in fact be seen as advantanges, because of the way that they can bind the work of art to the real. I briefly discuss some previous applications of metonymy to music, and outline an understanding of musical metonymy based on linear dissimilarity, historical and social contiguity, the origins and agency behind particular sounds, and an occlusion of the structural middleground. The first chapter discusses the work of J.H. Prynne. I argue that a use of metonymy as a productive constraint is illuminated by a philosophical position according to which the world is known to be real because of the resistances it presents to the actualisation of our desires. I discuss the role of metonymy in the development of Prynne’s poetic oeuvre, before illustrating my argument with a detailed analysis of the 2001 sequence Unanswering Rational Shore. In the second chapter I turn to the work of Derek Bailey. Drawing heavily on unpublished items from the Incus archive, I demonstrate the meticulous way in which Bailey constructed his improvisational vocabulary, and the senses in which that vocabulary and its deployment could be characterised as metonymic. I explore the influence on Bailey of Stockhausen, Beckett and Musil, and show how form and material in his work are inextricably entwined. The third chapter examines the work of Helmut Lachenmann and in particular the 1992 composition „... zwei Gefühle ...“, Musik mit Leonardo. I examine the role of the listener and the productive activity that metonymic structures require of them. I focus on Lachenmann’s deployment both of actual and pseudo-causality in his music, as well as his use of historical reference in an indexical fashion. In my fourth chapter I present my composition for improvisers, Representations. I discuss its mechanics, development, and influences, and I set forth its relationship to the concepts of musical metonymy I have elucidated in the body of this thesis, under the headings of “arbitration”, similarity, referentiality and the relationship between material and the middleground. In a short concluding chapter I take another angle on the links between the themes of this thesis by discussing the role of rubbish in the work of Prynne, Bailey and Lachenmann, and its apparently paradoxical relationship with a certain concept of purity. This allows me to conclude by considering the relationship of metonymic structures to a conception of truth which, I believe, has a certain urgency in the contemporary artistic climate.

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The Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (IFNM) contributed to the rise of solo multiple percussion music and compositional techniques found in early repertoire, including graphic notation and indeterminacy. John Cage wrote the first solo multiple percussion work (27' 10.554" for a Percussionist) in 1956, two years before he became involved at the Darmstadt IFNM. Cage then delivered a lecture at the courses in 1958 about indeterminacy, and the next year (1959) Stockhausen composed the second work for solo multiple percussion—Nr. 9 Zyklus—for the IFNM. In the same year, Stockhausen also delivered a lecture about graphic notation. Seven years later in 1966, Helmut Lachenmann—who was active at the IFNM since 1957—composed Intérieur I für einen Schlagzeugsolisten which utilizes graphic notation and indeterminacy. The three pieces by Cage, Stockhausen and Lachenmann will be examined in regards to how they employ graphic notation and indeterminacy and similarities and differences in how these techniques are used will be cited.

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This analysis examines similarities between different levels of the formal structure in Helmut Lachenmann’s second string quartet. The methodological approach presents a visual model of structural entities based on a categorization of sound structures that expands Lachenmann’s well-known »Klangtypen« (sound types), namely »sound processes«, »sound conditions« and »structure sounds«. It also describes three main types of categorical transformation relevant to the analysis, namely timbral transformation, transformation to impulse-categories, and transformation from horizontal to vertical sounds. An overview of the large-scale form reveals five main sections that introduce (1) flautato-, trill-/tremolo-, and noise-variants (all played »tenuto«), (2) »inverted pizzicati«/glissandi, (3) pizzicati, (4) pizzicato-chords and (5) »toneless« noise-variants respectively. The overall form might also be described as a process leading from »toneless« sounds to pitched sounds and back to »toneless« sounds again. This fadein/ fade-out of pitched sounds can also be observed on microformal levels, e.g. frequently in trill-variants, providing an example for formal self-similarity. In the main part of the analysis three sections comprising the first 19 bars of the quartet are analysed in detail, applying a hierarchical system of »supersounds« and »subsounds«. It can be argued that all three sections describe self-similar relationships with the large-scale form (and, consequently, among each other). The first five bars, for example, can be described as »tenuto«-sounds that are increasingly »perforated«, eventually resulting in short impulses – a process that is (self-)similar to the first three sections of the large-scale form. The further development of the piece up to bar 40 is considered a first major step towards what the composer has described as a »superinstrument« which combines all four instruments into a single sound body. Bars 35-40 in particular, can again be compared to the large-scale formal development, representing a first climax of four major realms of categorical transformation: horizontal to vertical, noise to pitch, solo to tutti, tenuto to impulse. Finally, the article argues that, although Lachenmann has probably conceived of the sound structures in his second string quartet in different terms than those introduced here, the revealed connections between different levels of the formal structure have been uncovered by his specific compositional methods.

A short perception-based analysis of Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression for cellist (1969/70) serves as point of departure for a general discussion of sound and perception as key methodological elements in the analysis and interpretation of post-tonal music and in their historical implications. Diverse perception strategies are applied to Pression: an »architectural« strategy, based on cross-references between salient cues in the sound surface, a transformation-oriented strategy, based on »categorical transformation« between noise and pitch, and strategies that emerge from the experience of presence and aspects of performance practice. From this analytical sketch emerges a provisional threefold definition of sound which tentatively suggests (1) that the term includes the entire spectrum between isolated sine waves and unpitched noises of maximal spectral complexity, (2) that there is no viable distinction between musical and non-musical sounds as it is not the property of an acoustic event, but only our interpretation of it that makes it part of a »musical« or »non-musical« context, and (3) that, consequently, our perception has the capacity to »organize« any acoustic event into a »sound«. Such a »liberal« and context-oriented definition motivates a historical review of the concept of sound and related perception theories since the late eighteenth century. Sound has been a prominent »Other« in nineteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, disciplined mainly by »form«, »structure«, or »logic«, supported by eye- and architecture-related metaphorical language. An early emancipation of sound, in contrast, was articulated through ear- and »wave«- or »stream«-related metaphors that profoundly influenced modernist music aesthetics (Herder, Richard Wagner). Facets of this discourse can be traced to the association of sound with the world of the unconscious and suppressed emotions as well as the discussion about the concealment or disclosure of a sound’s source. This debate expanded well into the later twentieth century including criticism of Wagner’s »objective sound« (Adorno), theories of »acousmatic listening« (Schaeffer, Scruton), »musique concrète instrumentale« (Lachenmann), and the twofold model of »hearing-in« (Hamilton). Music theory has yet to cope with the emancipation of sound as a primary category in the twentieth century as it was, and in part still is, limited by the persistence of a hierarchical »surface-depth metaphor« that places (sub-)structural relationships above »surface events«. The morphosyntactic analytical methodology, developed as part of the research project A Context-Sensitive Theory of Post-Tonal Sound Organization (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, 2012–2014), in contrast, aims to place a bodily-perceptual experience of sound events at the centre of analytical attention, based on three principal preliminaries: (1) the theory assigns a prominent role to the interaction of morphological (Gestalt-oriented) and syntactic (time-oriented) perceptual processes based on syntactic archetypes (tension/release, call/response, presence etc.); (2) it does not idealize a particular listening strategy, but aims at a multiplicity of perception modes that provide the basis for »performative listening«; (3) it under- stands musical perception as an interaction of cognitive factors and social construction with a particular focus on the relevance of everyday perception. A concluding analytical sketch aims to demonstrate the interaction of the archetypes »tension/release« and »presence«. A short morphosyntactic analysis of the third movement from Giacinto Scelsi’s I Presagi (1958) demonstrates how the »flat«, non- hierarchical absence of a conventional »event structure«, provoking the perception of a timeless presence of sound, is juxtaposed with a breath-like, ritualistic phrase arch- ing, suggesting a contemplative experience of sound transformed in time. »Performative listening« might be defined as a mode of perception that (consciously or intuitively) oscillates between such juxtaposed archetypes, allowing for an integration of a broad spectrum of meanings, associations, and emotions.

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Characteristics of Helmut Lachenmann’s music are approached through the author’s own music and musical thinking, intertwining portrait and self-portrait. Lachenmann’s music reflects problems of a recent history of composition and asks key questions about music’s relation to society. It challenges, for example, the position of composers/writers towards collective standards, but also reflects what critical thinking can mean in a society that consumes criticism and makes it part of its own system. Polyvalent structural relationships within Lachenmann’s music reflect his insistent method of observing and perceiving, of re-working, re-shaping traditional modes of listening. Whereas the terms »revolutionary« and »novelty« (not only in contemporary music) have become commodities or matters of fast changing trends, Helmut Lachenmann can be characterized as a »homo differentialis« whose work substantiates an existential necessity to bring music to the ear of the listener.