Like my other compositions from this period, Dal niente is also indebted from a technical perspective to the idea of a musique concrète instrumentale, in which all of the sounds point away from themselves to a certain extent toward the preconditions of their production, bringing the latter into the structural events as a kind of corporal experience. The instrument becomes a device: a characteristically manipulated filter for the players breath as controlled by the composition and its interpretation. The independent modification in finger positions, types of attack, and the forms of articulation in air pressure thus become discernible as a multi-level polyphony. Artificial structures of time and elementary perception of sound processes which are more objects of observation than of the sort of listening which is directed at expressivity condition each other and relocate the expressivity that was ousted from the single gesture to the emphatically concentrated experience of an awareness of their anatomy.
(Helmut Lachenmann, translated by Steven Lindberg)