New Simplicity

New Simplicity (Neue Einfachheit) is a label attached to young West German composers around 1980 who pushed back against the dominance of serialism and post-Darmstadt complexity. The 'simplicity' is rhetorical rather than naive: passages of stark tonal triads or single shouted lines coexist with dense atonal textures, and the music often draws on operatic gesture, expressionist drama and the harmonic memory of late Romanticism. Wolfgang Rihm is the central figure, but the label also covers Manfred Trojahn, Hans-Jurgen von Bose and Wolfgang von Schweinitz.

By the late 1970s the Darmstadt avant-garde had become institutional, and a younger generation began arguing that subjective expression, theatrical force and the body of the voice were missing from the new-music landscape. Rihm's chamber opera 'Jakob Lenz' (1979) — based on Buchner's novella about the unraveling poet Lenz — is the genre's calling card: short, harrowing, drawing freely on Schumann, Berg and free dissonance.

Listen for gesture rather than system: sudden cries, dense piled chords, near-tonal stretches, ghostly Romantic allusions. Voice and instrument push each other; a high held note from a soprano can pull a chord up by force. The structure is often discontinuous, with passages that feel like fragments of older music erupting in.

Start with Rihm's 'Jakob Lenz' (1979). For purely instrumental writing try his 'Dis-Kontur' (1974); 'Tutuguri' (1981-82) shows the large-scale sound.

Rihm and his peers were uneasy with the 'New Simplicity' label, which was largely the work of critics. They tended to describe their project less as simplicity than as the right to use any musical language — modal, atonal, gestural, theatrical — without ideological permission.