Rihm, Tonality, Psychosis, Modernity

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.

Becoming and Disintegration in Wolfgang Rihm’s Fifth String Quartet, Ohne Titel

“…Rihm's relationship to serialism and the avant-garde is complex and worthy of its own study. For more on this important question, see Williams (1997) and, Knockaert (2017), andBrodsky (2018).…”

“…Return to text 21. For a deeper study of the psychoanalytic role of tonality in Rihm's music, see Brodsky (2018).…”