Freiheitsdreck (2)

This chapter adopts Michel Foucault's canonical conception of heterotopia as another heuristic, a way of suggesting that New Music, as an otherwise extremely heterogeneous field of labor and mode of cultural production, could be considered precisely such an “other space,” one in which the more robust and hegemonic cultural fantasies of greater Europe are analyzed, broken apart and broken down, eventually traversed. It further suggests that these hegemonic fantasies first come to New Music as music. That is, it is in the medium, the form and format of (older) music, that these fantasies are made accessible to New Music in the first place. New Music encounters “joyful brotherhood” not primarily as a complex signifier, but insofar as it has a sound, a body, a coordinate in the symbolic order “music” that is, in this case, Beethoven's Ninth.

Fantasy & Fantasy (3)

This chapter argues that the present of postmodernism has come to seem like a stalled present, an agitated but idle meanwhile. This is precisely what Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein were trying to do, consciously and unconsciously: to show this perpetual present coming into being by putting on a show. It then considers the possibility that the pieces by Berio (Rendering), Goebbels (Befreiung), and Szymański (Kaleidoscope) are also doing the same thing. Rendering, Kaleidoscope, and Befreiung seem still to believe in modernity, or at least they wish for it and want it to appear, which is to say they act as subjects of a desire for modernity. In this they heed, before the fact, the first of Jameson's “four maxims of modernity”: they “cannot not periodize.” No one has told them that History is over. They seem still in the grip of “a powerful act of dissociation whereby the present seals off its past from itself and expels and ejects it.”

Freiheitsdreck (1)

This chapter focuses on three works that can be seen as “counter-events” to Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein: Heiner Goebbels's Befreiung for speaker and ensemble, Paweł Szymański's solo cello piece A Kaleidoscope for M. C. E., and Luciano Berio's Rendering, his “restoration” of the sketches to Franz Schubert's Tenth Symphony. While these events in on way compare—in terms of audience, mediation, or historical power—to the mega-events of part 1, their restaging of similar materials and scenarios in “contested” and “inverted” form is done in a kind of cultural nighttime, reconfigured as dreams configure the day's waking reality, its “recent and indifferent material,” as Freud puts it. The power that these new compositions lose as representatives of the year, they make up for as representatives of a certain truth, the truth of a collective unconscious desire—again, as dreams can tell the subject something about the truth concealed by its days.

Music & New Music (2)

This chapter returns to the book's own present, but drags fi-de-siècle Vienna with it, exploring a network of “Mahler pieces” from 1989. The network emerges partly out of unrelated, stylistically disparate works, some of which explicitly cite or allude to the composer, others of which stage Mahlerian scenes or tropes. But the bulk of the network is the result of deliberate effort—European cultural institutions commissioning composers to fantasize on their behalf, to produce collective scenes in which “Mahler” serves as a musical representative of “Europe.” Unsurprisingly, the composers respond in the negative—not with scenes, but with their dismantling; not with representations, but their travesty, ruin, or residue. The remainder of the chapter stumbles into the book's central repression: the presence of Theodor Adorno, whose 1960 monograph on Mahler is taken as an uncanny guide to these later works. The book ends with an extended consideration of Adorno's place in a Lacanian account of European musical modernism.

Repetition (4)

This chapter jumps back eighty years to the Viennese Sprachkrise, and to Schoenberg's Erwartung (1909) as an example of, and precedent for, Lacan's discourse theory. Indeed, emerging at the moment of Schoenberg's own “end of analysis,” Erwartung can be shown to have much in common with many of the inspired failures and missed encounters that structure the landscape of New Music in the Europe of 1989: its monstrous stylistic impurity; its strange hybrid of “blind technique” and asystematicity; its undoing of conventions without offering substitutes; its exposure of antagonisms that threaten the symbolic order out of which it emerges—in short, its loss, not just of the rules, but of the rules governing the rules. What lies between these two moments of “analytic modernism” is, among other things, the much longer historical transformation of Schoenbergian modernism into a master's discourse.

Repetition (2)

This chapter returns to Lacan's discourse theory, and offers a formalization of two moments of modernism, each of which can be understood through one of Lacan's discourse schemata: a “master's discourse,” and an “analyst's discourse.” “There is only one kind of psychoanalysis,” Lacan says in Seminar XI: “the training analysis—which means a psychoanalysis that has looped this loop [the traversal of the fundamental fantasy] to its end. The loop must be run through several times. There is in effect no other way of accounting for the term durcharbeiten [working through], of the necessity of elaboration, except to conceive how the loop must be run through more than once.”

Repetition (1)

It has been previously argued that Berio, Goebbels, Szymański; Gervasoni, Hölszky, Riehm, Kröll, Schnebel; Ruders, Leyendecker, Andriessen; Dusapin, Kagel, Lachenmann, Penderecki, Katzer, Nono, are all repeating something. This chapter considers what they are repeating. Certainly they are repeating “themselves.” This collection of repetitions also clarifies one thing: any rhetoric of “break” here, of whatever the opposite of repetition might be, would have to remain deaf to a past these works are carrying constantly with them. It is an “immediate past” already much more than immediate, opening onto an unprecedentedly rich terrain of artifacts and attitudes near and far.

Music & New Music (1)

This chapter attempts to expound a Lacanian discursive theory of New Music, and of aesthetic modernism more generally—a theory not just of how actors and subjects “talk” New Music, but how they more broadly “language” it, forging social links and desiring structures through the excessive materiality of music as much as the denotative operations of the signifier. What kind of subject—what “little God of the world,” as Goethe put it in Faust, part 1—is the modernist? What sort of desire founds its subjectivity on the new, literally throws itself under this mastering signifier of the not-yet? The chapter considers whether Rendering, Kaleidoscope, and Befreiung can be categorized as New Music.

Drei Phantasiestücke (3)

In the quarter century since the collapse of East Germany, the uncountable reflections that flower the media landscape inevitably turn to music. And when they do, they waffle. There is something untimely, and uncanny, about this waffling. It is as if the tensions structuring music's role in the heady days of the late 1960s were being therapeutically replayed twenty years later: 1968 yet again as the fetish object. On the one hand, music here is the fantasmatic sound of revolution itself, of truth speaking to power, and power falling to pieces under the weight of truth's irrefutable audibility, equal parts libido and righteousness. On the other hand, it is the traumatic reminder of failure, and the disenchanting premise that this “society of the spectacle” was not so powerful after all—that the revolution, in merely appearing, failed to show up. Judging from the examples of Hasselhoff, Rostropovich, and Bernstein, this chapter argues that music seems woven perfectly into a master's discourse: a process of shoring up a sovereign, of suturing itself to an empty signifier, producing a split subject, and precipitating an excessive enjoyment in the form of an object of desire.

Drei Phantasiestücke (2)

This chapter returns to the three of musical scenes discussed in Chapter 1 and asks what happens if these three liberation scenes at the Wall are read anamorphically? If we angle their transgressive foreground to reveal the constructedness of the “scenic armature” against which they unfolded? For instance, the battered, palimpsest-ed patch of the Wall behind Rostropovich can be read not only as the panorama for his performance, but as a necessary antagonist. It is precisely the Wall, in all its candy-colored gimcrack vulgarity, that props up Bach the eternal. The relationship is perfectly reflexive: Bach and Wall are re-encoded as antagonists in the very execution of the scene itself.