Time is on his side

[Helmut Lachenmann] said that ... when the work ["Air"] was finally performed in Frankfurt, Germany, the audience halted the percussive piece with shouts of “This is not music!” and derisive laughter.
Rick Schultz, "All he asks is: ‘Try to like it’", Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2008.
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Ah... the lethal judgment so beloved by lay people and experts alike: to dismiss the result of someone's creative efforts not because it lacks originality or craft, not because it involves factual errors or unsound arguments, but because it violates some a priori conditions supposedly necessary for admitting any kind of meaningful evaluation at all, whether positive or negative.
     Thus, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was dismissed by a notable 19th century music biographer as "not belong[ing] to the art ... [of] music".  Several decades later Edgar Varese's Hyperprism prompted a New York Times critic to write, "If Mr. Varese honestly believes this kind of thing is music, then he is ... deluded".
     In the visual arts, one of James Whistler's (now celebrated) paintings was dismissed by an eminent 19th century art critic as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face".
     In mathematics the distinguished and influential 19th century mathematician Leopold Kronecker reportedly dismissed Georg Cantor's pioneering work in set theory by saying "I don't know if there is more philosophy or theology in this paper, but I am sure there is no mathematics in it".
     And in physics, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow dismissed string theory by saying that "the theory is not physics at all but merely mathematical 'smoke and mirrors'".

These are the examples that readily came to mind when I learned about the audience's behavior at the premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's first major orchestral work Air, music for orchestra and percussion soloist (1967).  And just as with the above mentioned works, the passage of time has changed the perception of Lachenmann's Air from that of an irritatingly incomprehensible succession of scratching and wheezing noises to that of a musical work that is startling, thrilling, and even unexpectedly beautiful.

A friend of a friend II

... for me a Webern bagatelle is much more subversive and politically significant than all those requiems, cantatas and oratorios dedicated to the Holocaust, to 9/11 or to oppression in the Third World using depressive clusters, aggressive noises, threatening percussion orgies and sad nostalgic quotations.
HELMUT LACHENMANN,
"Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann", Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010, p.341.
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Back in 2011 I already voiced my contempt for mediocre composers who desperately try to mask the stale musical odor of their compositions with nauseatingly 'topical' titles, dedications, and program notes.  Little man that I am, I was certainly gratified to discover a similar attitude expressed by a composer whose music I greatly admire.

Not that I think it makes much sense to attribute, as Lachenmann does, "political significance" to (non-vocal) art music, if only because the relations between art music and politics have nothing to do with intrinsically musical values.  After all, in Nazi Germany the radical, cerebral Webern had the same 'political significance' as the jazzy Krenek, the derivative Shostakovich, and the bourgeois Mendelssohn, while in Stalin's USSR the 'political significance' of Webern's music was no different from that of Rachmaninov's sappy traditionalism and Stravinsky's acidic modernism (all were banned).  And in today's America all art music has the same 'political significance' - which is to say none whatsoever - since neither the government nor the people give a fuck about about it (except for a relatively very small number of 'faggots', 'weirdos' and 'eggheads' like myself).

A friend of a friend (so to speak)

I do like Helmut Lachenmann, for instance. His are noisy little pieces that are very cleverly done.
Elliott Carter, 30 May 2012.
Laura Emmery, "An American Modernist: Teatime with Elliott Carter", Tempo 67, 2013.
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Here is one such "noisy little piece", Tableau for Orchestra (1988), in live recordings by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle (February 2015, Amsterdam),  and by the WDR Sinfonieorchester under Peter Rundel (2 October 2015, Cologne, and 3 October 2015, Strasbourg).

A fifteen-year-long wait for the "Aha!" moment...

This is how long it seems to have taken Paul Griffiths - a very experienced music critic and a perceptive writer on modernist music in the 20th century - to change his mind about one of Helmut Lachenmann's most often performed orchestral works: 

Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) for eighteen-piece ensemble is quite successful in the avoidance [of anything pleasant to listen to].  [It is] a landscape of rustlings, scrapes, electric bells and pointless percussion toccatas. (The Times, July 8, 1986)

[In] Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) ... there are a lot of whirrings, scrapings, knocks and breathings. But not only are these noises beautifully made in themselves, they also add up to a bracing musical design. ... This omnipresence of sheer sound contributes to the poetry of Mouvement...  It comes as if from nowhere, takes you firmly by the hand and will not let go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected.  (New York Times, November 4, 2001)

For lack of better things to do, I briefly wondered about Griffiths' long delayed epiphany.[1]  After all, Lachenmann's Mouvement is neither intimidatingly complex (compared to, say, Carter's Double Concerto or Concerto for Orchestra) nor aggressively abrasive (unlike, e.g., the music of Xenakis or even Beethoven's Grosse Fuge).  For the most part Lachenmann's piece speaks quietly and delicately, and its large-scale structure is essentially that of three superimposed arcs representing gradual changes in pitch content, dynamic levels, and the density of texture.  In the manner of Hollywood screenwriters pitching an idea for a movie, one could simplistically describe Mouvement as Ravel's Bolero re-composed by Webern and performed on ingeniously adapted objects from the inventory of a hardware store.

People are strange...

As one who deeply admires the otherworldly, alien music of Helmut Lachenmann, I was jolted when I recently read an interview with the pianist Rolf Hind in which he said that Lachenmann's favorite composer is ... Ennio Morricone.  (Rolf Hind worked closely with Lachenmann on the composer's piano concerto Ausklang.)