Perspectives on York Holler: All contradictions reconciled?

ARNOLD WHITTALL explores aspects of the modern composer's dilemma in the music of York Holler

THE SEVENTH and last of York Holler's short Tagtraume (Daydreams) for violin, cello and piano, of 1994 (ex.l), is not only marked to be played `in the tempo of Schubert's "Der Leiermann" ': it alludes unambiguously to several aspects of that composition's materials - its pedal-based harmony, its circling repetitions, its rhythmic and intervallic motives, its unsparingly bleak atmosphere. In the CD notes (Largo 5140) Holler himself points to an association with a collection of poems by Cees Nooteboom concerned with the stark message that `time [...] is the black hole which swallows everything.' Time, Holler declares, is the most powerful enemy,

for whom death is merely an assistant. [...] In order to resist that black hole and to postpone the inevitable, however briefly, substance must be given to every dream or image, feeling or thought, that deserves to be brought into the broad light of day. Therein lies the vocation of the daydreamer.

Musicologists pride themselves on a scientific alertness to construction and function which is at the opposite extreme, as a vocation, from that of daydreaming. Yet, where the last fifty years of German music are concerned, discussion often remains focused on the field of force that emerged between the opposite poles of Stockhausen and Henze in the 1950s, in ways which have as much of fantasy as of reality about them. Even when Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Kagel are added to the dream-team determinants of post-war musico-cultural practice, and the necessary tensions between raging nostalgia and detached irony are reinforced, there is all too little in the way of familiar, frequently performed music for enquiring non-German musicians to take their bearings from. Nor is the British ploy of regarding Brian Ferneyhough and Chris Newman (or Chris Fox) as honorary Germans, who in some way alleviate the need to explore the extremes which they represent any more directly, a legitimate solution to the critical problem. But until a wider repertory is better known it is difficult not to lapse into the easy-going assumption that the well-contrasted aesthetic attitudes and compositional priorities of mid-century Henze and Stockhausen continue to shape the German scene as a whole, half a century later. Moreover in the case of York Holler - such attitudes might even be used to justify an overview of his career which sees a contrast, and a decline, between its launch in the full flight of Stockhausen-led technological excitement, and its collapse, gradually and not particularly gracefully, into an elegantly faded aura of Henze-like retrospection and pessimism.

IN HIS fascinatingly partisan writings on Helmut Lachenmann, who by date of birth (1935) bisects the period between Stockhausen's 1928 and Holler's 1944, Ian Pace has referred to that composer's discovery of a (for him, workable) 'tradition' in such composers as Cage and Nono.l Lachenmann's position might indeed seem an appropriate halfway house between two extremes - the Year-Zero ethos of Stockhausen's avant-garde idealism, and the lure of a lyric and increasingly history-conscious neoexpressionism, often rooted in the world and work of Holderlin, the supreme poet of disciplined irrationality. Pace has also commented on Lachenmann's emerging awareness of the impossibility of ignoring the historical connotations of any music, even that so removed from convention as his own, and that to shut out the past was analogous to an attempt to forget history, and thus be condemned to repeat its mistakes.2

Writing of Lachenmann's 'breakthrough' work, the clarinet concerto Accanto (1975-76), Pace observes that it `enters into a dialogue with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto', but that `only very brief fragments or snatches of harmony of the Mozart can be discerned.' He also emphasises Lachenmann's concern `to temper any sentiments of nostalgia with their opposite extreme, thus avoiding the pitfalls of many other works making use of quotation, which appeal to an audience primarily because they enable one to bask in the familiar.'3

Something similar could be said of Richard Barrett's brief, concluding allusion to Schubert's `Death and the maiden' in his orchestral composition Vanity (1990-94), but not of Holler's Winterreise 'Daydream' (nor of the Wagner quotation, courtesy of Berg's Lyric suite, in his Pensees) which, by Lachenmann's standards, might seem content to wallow in nostalgia as they attempt to achieve as complete and natural a synthesis as possible between quoter and quoted. In the wider context of contemporary German music, one can therefore see why Holler should be felt by some to have more in common with Henze than with an exact contemporary like Matthias Spahlinger, or with a younger composer whose way with nostalgia and reminiscence, and expressionism, is distinctly more radical - Wolfgang Rihm (b.1952). Yet it would not be correct to claim that all Holler has to offer is the opportunity to 'bask' - shamefully - in `the familiar'. It's just that, far from tempering nostalgia with music representing its opposite extreme, Holler seeks to contextualise the nostalgia, to make it feel at home rather than estranged.