Diether de la Motte

When I began studying composition with Diether de la Motte in Hamburg in 1971, he was only at the beginning of an unprecedented career as a music theorist. Only a few years earlier, his book ‘Musikalische Analyse’ (Musical Analysis) had been published, one of the most important works on analysis ever.

The book shows the immense breadth of de la Motte’s approach to music, which he drew primarily from the immanent mechanisms of musical events – and in the most diverse ways.

At a time when speculation about music was becoming more and more essential, this aspect of analysis, which was as it were tonal in nature and lacked any academic pettiness, stood out quite surprisingly in the landscape of music theory; and its power was broken only slightly by the criticising comments of the pontificating Carl Dahlhaus, who added a ‘right’ to each of de la Motte’s analyses.

Now, as a composition student in Hamburg – and perhaps my memory is exaggerating a little here – you were actually permanently surrounded by the greats of musicology. Helga de la Motte-Haber, Diether’s wife, began her remarkable career in this subject at the time I started my studies and so Diether was also connected to this circle as a family, so to speak, and – just as I experienced it myself – will not have received much encouragement for his compositional work.

The composing teacher was important for the student and during my time as a student, de la Motte developed his compositional work away from traditional forms towards a performative world in which he increasingly appeared as a musician himself.

The idea of the ‘Wandelkonzert’, in which not only the musicians but often also the audience ‘walked’, was realised in numerous variations, sometimes with self-built instruments, to form the basis of ensembles of instrumentalists and singers from the university, with which successful and sometimes very controversial performances were held throughout Germany.

At almost the same time, however, he also wrote an opera, ‘So oder So’ for the Hamburg State Opera, in which five stories for singers and small orchestra were performed in the traditional manner.

The range of de la Motte’s compositional work, which is hinted at here, probably enabled him to guide very different students and let them find themselves in a playful, almost imperceptible way.

Individual criticisms of ‘great works’ that had just been composed seemed almost banal and a little simple… it was only a long time later that one realised the extraordinary accuracy with which the problems in the composition were pointed out and with which the problems of the composer in general were also grasped.

When I was a student, Diether de la Motte did not cavort in the playgrounds of a New Music scene hyped by radio. Ultimately, he remained far too close to the musical – here in the sense of being involved in the music himself – to be able to find his place in the highly speculative world of the avant-garde.

He found it in his very own way of dealing with music theory and thus became probably the most important music theorist of our time.

His textbooks on harmony, melody and counterpoint, which have been distributed worldwide, have significantly changed our view of the music that surrounds us and led us into an open perspective. The fact that he also created a compositional work that is close to language, sometimes childlike, sometimes odd but always touching, which he performed himself with entertainer quality, shows the unbroken strength of a composer who had found a path that was entirely his own.

His path as a teacher from Hamburg via Hanover to Vienna, where he lived for another ten years after his retirement, led him to Berlin in 2006, where Helga de la Motte-Haber had also finished her university work in the meantime. It was only last November that I met Diether de la Motte there again, and we wanted to see each other more often and had already planned to do so in a few letters we exchanged. In May, Helga wrote to me that he was suffering from an insidious illness and a few days later I learnt of his death.

I have lost my most important teacher and a dear friend.

(nmz 7/2019)