Widely esteemed in mainland Europe from the late 1960s onwards, Helmut Lachenmann was slow to gain performances and appreciation in Britain and the USA, where the view stemming from the writings of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno—that music, inescapably reflecting the disintegration in western societies, must advance into the previously unheard, marginal and rejected, avoiding the easy options of regression to older norms or compromise with popular music—had less hold. By the end of the century, though, his importance was inescapable.

Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) and Salut für Caudwell

The ICA's concert series, returning for another summer season of Sunday nights, can be relied on to be stimulating. This first evening was devoted to the music of the fifty-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann, who has been played and talked about with increasing partisanship on the Continent, but who had not been much performed before in this country.

Lachenmann's starting-point would seem to be the familiar one that the house of music has long lain uninhabited, that all a composer today can do is to kick over the dust, shake a few bones and listen to the rodents behind the walls. These things he does with some assiduousness. The most characteristic sound of his music, to judge from the two pieces played on Sunday night, is a soft dry rattle, the noise very often of instructments being played in unconventional ways: air blown tonelessly through wind instruments, palms brushed over guitars, violins bowed on the neck.