Dal Niente

In a performance career which often calls for the use of extended instrumental techniques, it's been quite refreshing working on Lachenmann's Dal Niente. I've had quite a number of experiences where composers seem use these sonic effects more for their shock or novelty value, rather than as structural components which are developed into substantive ideas, as Lachenmann does. In the right hands, they can also very effectively enhance and expand the contextual sonic envelope of a piece without being structural. But in many other cases they do seem to be used as a kind of wallpaper of pseudo-sophistication, trying to add a layer of depth that sometimes doesn't quite match the design scheme of the piece as a whole.

Lachenmann is extremely meticulous with his notation, not only creating sensible symbols for each effect, but also devising a whole alternate set of values in bass clef, of all things, to differentiate between fingered playing with just air sound/key-click variants and the actual sounding treble-clef pitches which are notated normally. This initially seemed ludicrous for a treble instrument (indeed, as written the bass clef values do sound an octave higher than written, which was a little confusing a first). But if one shrugs off the convention of actually having to play something in the correct octave and looks at this system purely from an interpretive point of view, it becomes increasingly apparent that this was the right choice: as the piece cycles from bass to treble clef, one begins to develop a sense of two instrumental personalities struggling for dominance. One is the sound of the clarinet as we know it conventionally, and the other is its opposite, perhaps even its genesis; simple air, channeled at different speeds and modulated to bridge the gap between sound and space.