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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.

Perception of music as a complicated interaction between hearing and seeing is described as an attraction by two extremes, incarnation and subtraction. In the context of staging a drama or an opera, for instance, incarnation stresses the body of the actor, whereas subtraction dissolves him into an ideal silhouette, into a real but invisible person on stage. In many contemporary art forms such as happenings or sound installations both extremes may be observed, leading either to an emphasis on theatricality, or reducing the work to one single effect: »One sound may be enough« (David Toop). Both forms, however, aim towards a specific kind of presence, demanding utmost concentration with specific religious undertones: no discourse, no structure is transmitted, rather epiphanies emerge directly from colours, fragrances or sounds. Various forms of this polarity appear in the techniques and ceremonies of contemporary ars electronica which the article considers as a (possible) challenge to »classical« contemporary music that is fixed in a score. Helmut Lachenmann’s views on analytical listening and perception (a key metaphor since the end of the twentieth century) are examined in this context, focussing on the musician’s body in selected works including Air (1968/69), Kontrakadenz (1970/71) and NUN (1999/2002). All three examples make clear that »listening« to Lachenmann’s music often implicates seeing how this music is performed in order to grasp how »heterogeneous series« connect diverse sound producing media and techniques. The relationship between hearing and seeing in Lachenmann’s music has recently been isolated by choreographer Xavier Le Roy who has produced ritualistic as well as »subtracting« versions of works such as Salut für Caudwell (1977) and Mouvement (1982/84). A completely »mute« performance of the latter work (Le Roy lets the musicians perform the complete piece without instruments), however, tends to simplify this relationship that might be described as an attempt to breach hearing by seeing and seeing by hearing.