Lachenmann H "Grido" for String Quartet

For me, composing means, if not “solving a problem”, then indeed ecstatically grappling with a traumatic dilemma: to confront the technical challenges of composition – perceived and adopted – so as to bring about a resolution. While this situation, per se, is not new to me, it nonetheless remains alien, for it is in this that I lose myself, and in so doing truly find myself again. I know that sounds enigmatic, yet in different ways, every “problem”, every “traumatic dilemma”, embodies the categorical question of the possibility of authentic music. This concept of authenticity has become questionable because of mucics ubiquity and ready availability; administered on a global scale in a civilisation which has been flooded and saturated by music (auditory consumerist magic) and which, because it has become standardised, has been dulled. That questionability is an unconsciously recognisable and suppressed collective reality. It is the exterior of our repressible – yet no less real – inner longing for liberated space for the perceptive soul: for “new” music.