ABSTRACT
Musical acoustics and psychoacoustics have informed us that in music there is hardly any sound without noise components – components that in many cases and respects are crucial for the characteristics of a particular instrumental or vocal timbre and make it so hard to produce ‘exact’ copies of such timbres through physical modelling. Twentieth-century music since Luigi Russolo, Erik Satie and Edgard Varese has explored two different functions of noise: its fundamental incompatibility with and its gradual approximation to pitched and tonal sounds. Lachenmann scholarship has largely followed the composer’s own scepticism concerning the term ‘noise’.The unsettling qualities of noise-permeated sounds in Lachenmann’s works assume a crucial function in disturbing such pacified areas. The fragmentary character referred to in the title of the work is particularly recognizable in the ‘interrupted exposition’ that introduces a large number of sound families, while in the further course long passages are reduced to only a few families or sounds.
