ABSTRACT

This chapter describes an interview which took place on 19 January 2006 in Paris, during the concert series 'Lachenmann/Mozart' at the Citè de la Musique. The year of Lachenmann's seventieth birthday, 2005, saw an explosion of international interest in the composer's work. In the early essay, 'Klangtypen der Neuen Musik', Lachenmann sets out his aesthetic agenda systematically for the very first time. The chapter brings together the latest avant-garde tendencies of that period in a unique synthesis: the serialist idea of tight connections between the smallest details of the work and its overall form and the timbral music embodied in the work of composers such as Ligeti and Nono at the time. The term 'musique concrète instrumentale' mentioned in the interview refers to the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and the French school of electroacoustic composition in the 1940s and 50s.