The Mischief I Made

When a friend sent me a YouTube video of Helmut Lachenmann’s newest piece, “Marche fatale” for orchestra, I texted him back asking, “Holy shit, is this a joke?” The eminent German, who writes noisy works of intimidating craft and intelligence, who has probably single-handedly invented more new instrumental sounds than anyone in music history, had composed a tonal march with a catchy tune and a musical fart joke; the white-bearded intellectual famous for deconstructing the classical repertoire through instrumental techniques of incomparable refinement had written a cousin to the ultimate cartoon music, Johann Strauss the Elder’s “Radetzky March.”