Various Artists

Featuring: Helmut Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, York Holler, Robert HP Platz, Wilhelm Killmayer, Wolfgang Rihm, Mauricio Kagel

condition (records/box): NM / NM Insert included. | Volume 10 - and final installment - of the extraordinary documentation series issued by the Deutscher Musikrat between 1981 and 1984, mapping the full arc of contemporary composition in the Federal Republic of Germany from the immediate post-war years through to 1980. This closing volume covers the decade 1970-1980, a period of enormous creative ferment in which the post-serial consensus fractured into radically divergent paths - and the roster of composers here reads like a who's who of that rupture.

The centerpiece is Helmut Lachenmann's Tanzsuite mit Deutschlandlied (1979/80), a monumental work for solo string quartet and orchestra premiered at Donaueschingen in October 1980 - one of the defining scores of its decade. Lachenmann's "musique concrète instrumentale" is here applied to the ghost forms of Western dance music (waltz, siciliano, gigue, tarantella, polka, galop), the Deutschlandlied threading through the texture like a half-buried memory, the Arditti Quartet set inside the orchestra as what the composer described as "a louse in the fur" - forcing one to listen in and out simultaneously. The work sprawls across the entirety of sides A and B.

Dieter Schnebel's Schubert-Phantasie (1978) pursues a parallel strategy of historical engagement from a very different angle - a divided orchestra reimagining the first movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in G major through the lens of late 20th-century sonic thinking. Alongside these, the box presents orchestral and chamber works by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Wolfgang Rihm, York Höller, Robert HP Platz and Wilhelm Killmayer - collectively documenting the remarkable breadth of compositional thought coexisting in West Germany during the 1970s, from Stockhausen's continuing cosmic ambitions to Rihm's neo-expressionist eruptions, from Kagel's sly theatricality to Killmayer's lyrical dissent against the Darmstadt orthodoxy.

3LP box set with 42-page bilingual booklet (German/English) containing texts on the composers and their works. Released on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi / EMI Electrola. Recordings by Südwestfunk, Sender Freies Berlin and other German radio orchestras. An indispensable document of one of the richest periods in European contemporary music, and increasingly difficult to find in good condition.