For me, composing always means, if not "solving a problem", then at least dealing with a trauma, full of fear/pleasure, and using such perceived and accepted compositional challenges to create a sounding situation that is, if not new to me, at least strange, and in which I lose myself and thus find myself all the more. That certainly sounds very private, but that "problem", that "trauma" always embodies in a different way the categorical question of the possibility of authentic music in a situation where this term seems to be collectively managed and has become questionable due to its ubiquity and total availability in a civilization flooded with "music" (= aurally staged magic for domestic use), saturated and made dull by standardized services. This problematic and questionable nature is an unconsciously recognized and repressed reality, it is the outside of our, no less real, repressible but also recognizable inner longing for liberated spaces for the perceiving mind: for "new" music.

My third string quartet reacts to these aspects under more difficult conditions, so to speak, because in two previous works for the same good, old, venerable and tradition-laden instrumentation I have exposed myself to this coping game, certainly under different inner conditions and each time with a different background of experience. The "Gran Torso" from 1971 and the "Reigen seliger Geister" from 1989 marked turning points in my compositional practice. In "Gran Torso" I exemplified a - my - concept of material which, instead of orienting itself on intervallic-rhythmic-timbral conditions, was based on the concrete energy in the production of sound and which I labeled at the time - provisionally, but still unrevised today - as "musique concrète instrumentale", whereby I turned the string quartet into a sixteen-stringed playing body, which - resounding, rushing, breathy, pressed - reacted with its physicality to tractations in which traditional playing represented only a specific variant of dealing with the apparatus. My second quartet, the "Reigen", 18 years later, could only go beyond this by focusing on a single style of playing developed at the time, namely that of pressureless flautato playing, in which tones function more as shadows of noises (or, conversely, noises or soundless noise as shadows of intervallically precisely controlled tones and sequences). This focussing, i.e. refinement and multiple variations, in turn transformed itself into the diametrically opposite, into pizzicato landscapes, quasi backwards recordings of abruptly crescendoing bow sweeps, whereby a different or differently polarized world of sound and expression actually opened up. With these two works I thought I had overcome the trauma of the string quartet, especially as I had also dealt with this formation pretty much halfway between these two works, namely in 1980 in my "Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied", a kind of concerto for string quartet and orchestra.

And now? What does Robinson Crusoe do when he thinks he has discovered his (his?) island? Will he settle down again and return to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle in his own home? Should he heroically tear down what he had built, should he leave his nest? What does the wayfarer do when he has already made his way through the impassable? He exposes himself and writes his "Third String Quartet" ... Because the complacent appearance is deceptive: nothing is developed ... "Paths" in art lead nowhere and certainly not to the "goal". For this is nowhere else but here - where the familiar becomes strange again when the creative will rubs up against it - and we are blind and deaf.

The work is dedicated to the musicians/friends of the Arditti Quartet: Graeme Jennings, Rohan de Saram, Irvine Arditti, DOv Scheindlin.

(Helmut Lachenmann (2010), commentary on String Quartet No. 3 "Grido", published in the work score by Breitkopf & Härtel)

As part of the Heidelberger Frühling Streichquartettfest 2025, the String Quartet No. 3 "Grido" can be heard on Saturday morning, January 25, 2025 at 10:00.