"My music has been concerned with rigidly constructed denial, with the exclusion of what appears to me as the listening expectations preformed by society."

The first punchline of Lachenmann's infamous 1969 score Guero is that it's a piece for one instrument named after another: a work which tries—and largely succeeds—to make a concert grand piano sound like a small, wooden instrument from South America known in English as a "scraper." The second punchline of Guero is also quickly dispatched: it's a piano-piece in which not one note is actually played, nor a single key entirely depressed. In effect, the intended modes of sound-production for this art-music warhorse are entirely avoided, withheld, deprived, or, to use a phrase ambivalently adopted by Lachenmann himself, precisely "rejected."

Through a brilliant "misreading," what is instead created is a six-manual percussion-device, whose exploitation works through each manual sequentially: the piece begins with fingers running along the fronts of the "white keys" (thus creating clicking sounds as the nails hit the narrow space between each key), then across their tops, then along the fronts and tops of the black keys, and finally, along the tops of the tuning pegs and eventually even on the tips of the piano strings themselves (above the bridge). A ritual-like attention stirs the piece as it goes, but Guero also manifests a certain weird pathos; it works like a darker sibling of Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," testifying to both the eternal beauty of an absent civilization, and the eternal absence of a beautiful civilization. The score becomes a loving and yet disquietingly ambivalent shroud laid atop tradition, whose dull outlines remain shockingly recognizable in their dumb and mute stillness.

But ultimately, Guero becomes a kind of double act of tracing which awakens two great objects, only the first of which is the piano-monster, with its imposing monolith-machinery and monumental historical baggage. The other object becomes the pianist's consciousness itself, and through extension the consciousness of the listener as well. Sensually limning only the edges of the instrument, the performer and listener execute a ritual of rigorous estrangement on themselves as well, locating the peripheries of their expectations and their desires, and making those peripheries announce themselves—indeed, sounding them out and forcing them to speak. Articulating the edge, the boundary, the limit—the impulse to freedom always works towards this goal, because only through finding the limit can one move beyond it (think of when you first asked yourself "Where does the universe finally stop?"—and then followed shortly with "What lies beyond that?") In this sense, Guero becomes a kind of existentialist teaching tool, a kind of symbolic index finger (via the actual index fingers) extended at the door of unexploited cognitive and performative opportunities. Even as it masquerades as a blank musical erotica, caressing the object's skin, the piece heeds philosopher Heidegger's life-guiding prerogative: "He who truly knows what is, knows what he wills to do in the midst of what is."

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide