Utopian strain: Ambivalent absolutes in European composition, 1968--2001.

摘要

The study at hand engages a network of poetics, techniques, and tropes within postwar European composition between 1968 and 2001. I focus on four figures: Italy's Luciano Berio (1925-2003), Hungary's György Ligeti (1923-2006), and Germany's Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935) and Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952). Four of postwar Europe's more iconoclastic and influential artists, they are disparate in style, idiosyncratic in technique, allegiant to different aesthetic and political traditions.;Their mutual iconoclasm ought not mask a significant network of similarities. First, each composer presently holds a reputation as one of European music's most visible and prolific thinkers, continuing a 19th-century tradition of composer-as-critic. Second, each levies a deeply ambivalent assessment of musical modernism, asserting the musical work in particular as a site for constructive materialism, but also its spiritual critique; abstract form, but also its expressive subversion; tactile reality, but also unattainable ideal.;From these collective affinities emerges a third: early in their careers, these four composers engage the work of Theodor W. Adorno, whose influence will continue to affect them each, especially Adorno's inimitable brand of idealism—one which progresses through "determinate negation" and "negative dialectic", seeking to defend a modern ideal of the utopian totality through its most persistent, unflinching critique.;Adorno's ideas on "utopia: the unspeakable" provide this dissertation's framework, and also the composerly dilemma it explores—that of a European art "which must be and wants to be utopia...yet at the same time, in order not to betray utopia through illusion and consolation, will not allow itself to be utopia." I argue that Berio, Ligeti, Lachenmann, and Rihm practice precisely such a Janus-faced modernism. Each is a utopian at-the-crossroads, repeatedly submitting various historically informed musical utopias to individual processes of erasure and recovery. In their ambivalence, these composers articulate a remarkable tension between history, utopia, and memory—between "that which happened", "that which has not yet happened", and the consciously subjective recovery and effacement of both. The complexity of this tension suggests a revision not only of the narrative of a music "after Auschwitz," but also the meta-narratives of postwar musical modernism in general.