What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? This unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music focuses on the unlikely year 1989, when New Music hardly takes center stage. Instead one finds Rostropovich playing Bach at Checkpoint Charlie; or Bernstein changing “Joy” to “Freedom” in Beethoven's Ninth; or David Hasselhoff lip-synching “Looking for Freedom” to thousands on New Year's Eve. But if such spectacles claim to master their historical moment, New Music unconsciously takes the role of analyst. In so doing, it restages earlier scenes of modernism. As world politics witnesses a turning away from the possibility of revolution, musical modernism revolves in place, performing century-old tasks of losing, failing, and beginning again, in preparation for a revolution to come.
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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