A Lesson in Composition with Hans Ulrich Lehmann
Many years ago, when I was studying composition with the Swiss composer Hans Ulrich Lehmann, I experienced a lesson that profoundly changed my understanding of music. I remember it vividly to this day. I had composed a piece for organ and was rather proud of it. It was based on twelve-tone technique and involved a triple canon, with inversions of the tone row. The construction was elaborate, and I had spent considerable effort ensuring that everything worked correctly. The rows were properly organized, the inversions were correct, and the canonic relationships were maintained. From a technical point of view, I was quite satisfied with my achievement.
Hans Ulrich Lehmann was a fairly well-known composer at the time, particularly for his highly avant-garde style. He had himself studied under Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and, if I remember correctly, as he once told me himself, under Olivier Messiaen for a time as well. I went to my lesson eager to show him what I had accomplished. He took the score and began examining it at the piano. As he studied the music, I enthusiastically started explaining its construction: which tone row I had chosen, how I had inverted it, how the three voices related to one another, and how carefully I had worked out the contrapuntal structure.
He interrupted me, smiling. “Das interessiert mich nicht. Es ist Ihre Buchhaltung.” That doesn’t interest me. It’s your bookkeeping.
Then he indicated that he wanted to look at the music I had brought him. I was schocked! I had come to demonstrate the ingenuity of my compositional construction, and he seemed entirely uninterested in my explanations. The piece contained rapid passages of sixteenth notes, played with considerable passion and intensity. Lehmann sat at the piano and improvised a passage resembling what I had written, but with some notes different as mine. Then he asked me: “Wäre es auch so gut?” Would it be good this way, too?
I hesitated. The truth was that I had not really been listening to what I was composing. My attention had been directed toward the system. As long as the tone row was correct, the inversions worked, and the canon followed its rules, I assumed that everything was fine. I had been concerned with whether the notes were technically correct, not whether they were the notes I actually wanted to hear. So, somewhat uncertainly, I answered: “Yes, that sounds good too.” He immediately objected. “Nein, das ist nicht so. Sie müssen wissen, was Sie wollen und was Sie tun.” No, it doesn’t work so. You must know what you want and what you are doing.
I was puzzled. “How am I supposed to achieve that, what do you mean? The notes are already given!” I said. His answer was disarmingly simple: “Sie müssen hören.” You must listen. He continued by explaining that perhaps one note should be delayed a little longer, while another should arrive sooner, or perhaps put one a little lower than before etc. These were not questions that could be answered merely by consulting the tone row or checking whether the canon was correct. They were musical decisions, and I had to make them with my ears.
And then I began to understand. A twelve-tone row is not music. A canon is not music. An inversion is not music. They are techniques, structures, and possibilities from which music may emerge. But they cannot decide for the composer what should actually be heard. The fact that a note satisfies a compositional rule does not mean that it has arrived at the right moment. The fact that three voices form a technically correct canon does not mean that their interaction is musically convincing. The composer must listen, judge, choose, and take responsibility for the result.
We were finishing our lesson. He had risen from the piano and was standing in front of me. “Look,” he said, “I could write two voices at home, and you could write the other two at your home. Then we could put them all together, and it would work perfectly well. But we couldn’t do that with a canon in the style of Bach.”
I no longer regard technical complexity as an artistic achievement in itself. A simple harmonic progression may produce wonderful music, just as an elaborate contrapuntal construction may produce something entirely uninteresting. What matters is not how difficult the music was to construct, but what the listener actually hears. And perhaps that is the most important distinction Lehmann taught me: the difference between constructing a piece of music and truly composing it.
Even today, I can still hear his words: “Das interessiert mich nicht, es ist Ihre Buchhaltung.” In this lesson I understood 12note music. Well, no, I understood music! There is, however, always a problem with academic music composition: we seem to have become overrun by accountants…