Hans Helms, "daidalos"

The outsider position that Hans G Helms (born in Teterow, Mecklenburg, in 1932) has occupied in the musical scene in post-war Germany is not only a result of the short period during which he actually composed (mainly from 1955-1962). If it is rare for a self-taught person to write music, it is even rarer that he should acquire an education and knowledge which extends far beyond music and the subjects that normally go with it: Helms is an authority also on social history and political economy.

Helms received his only training in music during his childhood. A White Russian who had ended up in Mecklenburg gave him piano lessons, mainly during the war, which took him to the level of Bart6k's "Microcosmos", and some lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Helms was introduced to jazz (cool jazz was just beginning) by the American Forces Network. In the first post-war years, through contacts with the American army of occupation, he learned to play the tenor saxophone, and, from 1950-1952 played in a number of bands in Sweden with, among others, Gene Krupa and Charlie Parker, and a year later with Hans Kollar in Vienna. Presumably the young Helms had already looked upon jazz during the last years of the Nazi regime as psychological-political liberation music.

In the early fifties he heard recordings of works by Ives and Cowell, and then compositions by Alban Berg and the Schoenberg school.

In 1953, Helms met the philosopher and sociologist Helmut Plessner in Gottingen, and shortly afterwards Th. W. Adorno in Frankfurt: friendships which were to have an influence on his future work, developed with both of them. From 1954 to 55, Helms worked at the Rot-Weiss-Rot radio station in Vienna, and created, together with Ingeborg Bachmann and others, a new type of words and music programme: poetry and jazz.

In 1957 he settled in Cologne, where Gottfried Michael Koenig was setting up the Studio for Electronic Music at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk.

In contact with Werner Meyer-Eppler, Helms carried out phonetic experiments during this period, did speech and sound analyses, and studied linguistics and cybernetics. In the same period he came in contact with John Cage, Michael Gielen, Boolez, and Stockhausen at the Donaueschinger Musiktage and the Darmstiidter Ferienkurse. In Cologne a music circle was formed in He1ms's flat which included Koenig, Heinz Klaus Metzger and Mauricio Kagel. Reading from Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" was one of the main joint activities. From this concatenation emerged two of Helms's most important works: "Fa:m' Ahniesgwow" (1959) and "daida-10s" (1961). "Golem" followed in 1962, and later "Konstruktionen uber das 'Kommunistische Manifest'" for 16-part choir (1968).

Since the beginning of the sixties, Helms has been active mainly as a writer of music programmes and television films with a critical accent. The reason for this is Helms's belief that the dispersal of the ideological smokescreen cast over social phenomena in radio and television can be pursued more efficiently with sociological features than with music. Instead of music, Helms has produced works such as "The Ideology of the Anonymous Society" (1966), "Max Stirner" (1968), "Marxism and the German Federal Republic" (1969), and "Capitalist Town Planning" (1970). Helms has also been active in trade union training programmes. His conviction that every criticism of the socialsuperstructure is too superficial if it does not culminate in investigation of the economic roots of capitalism - with its spectrum of liberal to faschist tendencies - led him to the study of integrated economic and social history as pursued by Jurgen Kuczynski in Berlin. The USA has become his main field of research in recent years. In 1982 he moved to New York.

"daidalos", for four solo voices, was written as a complementary work to Hans Otte's piece for six instrumental soloists with the same title. The legend of Daidalos (Daedalus) is already critical of the objectizazion of man - which is the basic thought behind Helms's work. Daidalos constructed creatures which could behave like humam but which had no power of thought. In our age, these artificial people, robots, possess an electronic brain. The homogenization of robot and man continues. Alienation as a result of excessive division of labour has also tended to reduce the language of the masses to set phrases and cliches which are interchangeable. These phrases and cliches - verbal and instrumental - are intended to be so jumbled in the two parts of the composition that they are shattered against one another and new meanings emerge. The work makes use of phonetic, grammatical, and semantic alienation - Brecht's term is justified here; the linguistic material used in this work by Helms is a selection of phrases as used in cafes or public transport, by lovers or people cursing one another. As the composition of the phonetic dimension and linguistic gestus is continued in the musical sphere, the free association technique taken over from Joyce - in Helms's work the constructive aleatory element dominates - leads to new forms of expression. They are the highly artificial product of negation of the banal.

Adorno liked quoting a remark of Karl Kraus, which said that it was the task of art to introduce chaos into order - and not the other way round. -- Albrecht Betz (Translation: John Bell)