Building an Instrument, Building an Instrumentalist: Helmut Lachenmann'sSerynade

Abstract

In Helmut Lachenmann's Serynade (1998, revised 2000), the solo piano is explored as a pianistic resource from which to build a new instrument and new experiential relationships to it. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I show that implicit to building instruments are encounters with wider aesthetic and historical questions—particularly of the relationships between the body and technology as they mutually mediate one another. As such, Lachenmann's exploration of pianistic technologies inherently engages with the handed-down embodied relationships that exist between player and instrument—pedagogy—both finding themselves modified and reconfigured in the moment of performance. Instrument and instrumentalist are rebuilt in relation to one another.

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