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Rihm, Tonality, Psychosis, Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 August 2018

SETH BRODSKY
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Abstract

Wolfgang Rihm's is one of the more radical – which is to say ‘deep’ and ‘rooted’ – relationships towards tonality among all post-war composers. In this article, I concentrate on the role psychosis plays in this relationship, arguing that tonality for Rihm often assumes the operations of what Jacques Lacan called a symbolic order: a network of laws and codes which sustain the world of subjects and others. In Lacanian terms, it is the subject's unsuccessful installation in the symbolic which triggers psychosis – a state organized by mimetic rivalries, the body's invasion by jouissance, and the de-hierarchization and loss of control of the drives. Tonality, for Rihm, is a poorly installed symbolic order, from which music ‘breaks’ psychotically. But it would be a mistake to pathologize Rihm's music. Rather, Rihm's is one of the more cunning, problematic, ‘neurotic’ solutions to one of modernism's oldest challenges: how to function creatively in the absence of (a) language. Both the challenge and the solution are themselves as old as aesthetic modernism; they can be understood as the two sides of modernism's ‘fundamental fantasy’, in which madness becomes a practicable sanity, and psychosis a saving symbolic order.

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Information
Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 147 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2018 

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Discography and Filmography

Herzog, Werner, dir. 1974. Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) (West Germany).Google Scholar
Various artists. 1978. Adolf Wölfli, Gelesen und Vertont, produced by the Bernischer Kunstgesellschaft and the Adolf-Wölfli-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern. Turicaphon, LP 30–624.Google Scholar