Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952) first achieved prominence in the mid-1970s, just a few years after Adorno’s premature death in 1969; thus we can only speculate about what Adorno would have made of the young Rihm. Alluring as such conjecture might be, however, this chapter aims to create a dynamic in which Adorno’s aesthetics of music and Rihm’s oeuvre can exert a critical and enhancing influence on each other. This interplay reveals that Rihm is able to develop many of the key components of Adorno’s aesthetics beyond the boundaries that often constrain Adorno’s own thinking. By responding intuitively to key issues in modernist/postmodernist music aesthetics, Rihm finds ways to place Adornian ideas in new constellations. At the same time the range of Adorno’s thinking enables wider understanding of what are often practical issues for Rihm.
The first section of this essay examines the prevailing currents in Adorno’s aesthetics of twentieth-century music, especially those in his approach to music written after 1945. Even though Adorno is often associated with the high modernism that Rihm leaves behind, I will argue that the two figures find common ground in their mutual understanding of music as a form of subjectivity. The second section opens with a brief survey of Rihm’s activity as a composer before considering how he interprets Adorno’s emphasis on musical subjectivity; it then reflects on the challenges posed to Adornian aesthetics by Rihm’s insistence on the immediacy of music. The third section then examines how Rihm creates new meanings from traditional materials, paying particular attention to a group of Schumann-inspired pieces. Finally, the last section takes up Adorno’s previously explored idea of a musique informelle, and reconsiders it from the perspective of Rihm’s recent interest in reworking his own material. In its most dramatic form this preoccupation has led Rihm to reconfigure material in multiple contexts, thereby pushing understanding of musical subjectivity beyond the confines of the self-contained score.
It is impossible to separate Adorno’s writings on music from the idea of subjectivity, or, more specifically, from the idea that music is a form of subjectivity. His thinking in this respect is not unique. What makes his understanding of musical subjectivity so striking, however, is his insistence that the aesthetics of music cannot be isolated from a wide-ranging understanding of the situation of music in industrialized, or, put more corrosively, administered societies. Indeed, his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory demonstrates how understanding the ways that large-scale social processes have an impact on the aesthetic sphere of bourgeois art music tells us much about the situation of modern subjectivity. Accordingly, an understanding of subjectivity in music requires attention both to internal technical issues and to the social processes that mediate musical material.
It is well known that Adorno’s portrait of modern subjectivity is a bleak one in which a sense of self is eroded by social and economic processes indifferent to the fate of the individual. He talks of twentieth-century music — especially when discussing Schoenberg — embodying a subjectivity that seeks refuge in the objective procedures of composition, finding more authenticity in configurations of sound than in obvious displays of emotion. It was this stance, together with a notion of the historical development of musical material, that led him to envisage in Philosophy of New Music a “rational total organization (Durchorganisation) of the work”;2 a conception that on the face of it would seem to reconcile itself more with the project of high modernism than with the richly textured aesthetic I am attributing to Adorno.
The situation is confusing because Adorno certainly speaks with more than one voice about the dialectic of expression and construction in musical material. Stereotyped depictions of Adorno, usually in connection with Philosophy of New Music, often heed his remarks on the exigencies of structure more than his call for human agency. In this reading he becomes, therefore, an advocate of precisely the constructionist aesthetic that Rihm challenged in the 1970s. This interpretation is not, however, sustainable because Adorno certainly does not endorse those strands of modernism that attempted to bypass subjectivity, nor does he subscribe to the idea that the meaning of music could somehow be conflated with its technical consistency, since he understood musical objectivity to arise through the subject.3
Many of the tensions ingrained in Adorno’s understanding of musical material come to the fore in “The Aging of the New Music,” a lecture delivered at Darmstadt in 1955. A notable feature of this polemic is that it envisages more continuity with the past, especially when it talks positively of Schoenberg’s links with aspects of tonal organization, than Adorno’s previous stance on musical material would lead us to expect.4 Yet this essay is less of a volteface than sometimes assumed, for its main point is that technical invention for its own sake amounts to little more than a shelter for subjectivity to hide behind. We find Adorno still pursuing this argument forcefully in the later essay “Music and Technique” (1958), where he contends that a technocratic approach to composition, far from transcending subjectivity, actually reinforces it in a thoroughly depleted form.
The expulsion of the subjective factor from a thinglike, objective construction that, not immediately graspable, is able to prove its worth only in terms of abstract correspondences is no act of objectification. Precisely through its elimination, subjectivity is unconsciously taken to an extreme, a project designed to conquer nature that ends up worshiping the fossilized result of its manipulations as if it were being in itself.5
This point is indirectly supported by an article on Webern from the same volume (Sound Figures), where Adorno’s tone contrasts with the mainly formalist reception of Webern adopted by high modernism.6
It is not, then, surprising that the dim view of the aesthetic preoccupations of 1950s modernism articulated in “The Aging” created a rift between Adorno and a younger generation of musicians; a gap Adorno attempted to bridge when he returned subsequently to Darmstadt in 1961 to present “Vers une musique informelle,” and later in 1966 to deliver “Form in der neuen Musik.” (“Form in New Music”) “Vers une musique informelle” shows Adorno absorbing the influence of open form in music into his wider cultural thinking, while at the same time also exploring how the philosophical issues that preoccupied him might take musical shape. This essay does not abandon the type of thinking found in “The Aging,” but it certainly adopts a more positive tone about what might be achieved by practices willing to push beyond the boundaries of traditional form. For Adorno speculates about a music that would be dependent neither on traditional forms nor on technical systems; instead, like the pieces deriving from Schoenberg’s free atonal period, the music he foresees would create its own form from its own immanent needs — and it does not take too much imagination to understand the implications this way of thinking might have for a self-determining subjectivity. More specifically, Adorno envisages what he calls “a third way between the jungle of Erwartung, on one hand, and the tectonics of Die glückliche Hand, on the other.”7
“Vers une musique informelle” is a demanding essay, yet from its earliest days it has proved endlessly fascinating to both composers and scholars. In a specific sense the latter have found close parallels between Adorno’s thinking and, for example, György Ligeti’s scores of the early 1960s.8 In a more general sense, composers in particular, without always following the detail of Adorno’s argument, have valued the prospect of unrestrained creativity and cherished the idea of a music capable of generating its own form. Perhaps nowhere is this proposition more beguiling than in the famous last sentence, which is quoted by Rihm himself: “The shape of every artistic utopia today is: to make things in ignorance of what they are.”9
One of the problems Adorno was trying to overcome with the notion of a musique informelle is returned to later in “Form in der neuen Musik” where he writes: “Integration and disintegration are intertwined.”10 Clearly Adorno is here thinking of the tendency, actively explored by John Cage, for systematic control and chance procedure to become indistinguishable from each other. In Aesthetic Theory, where the interdependence of organization and contingency is explored beyond the confines of music, he attributes the insight to Ligeti, presumably with the latter’s analysis of Pierre Boulez’s Structure 1a in mind.11 Darmstadt debates offered Adorno perspectives on the interaction of structure and order, of determinacy and indeterminacy, that influenced his work beyond the sphere of modern music. Bear in mind, however, that the opposite is also likely to be true: Adorno’s wider understanding of the intersections of concept and object gave him significant awareness of the hazards of overrationalized compositional techniques.
Adorno hopes for a form of music in which particular moments are not subsumed by the overall structure; and it is well known that for him this vision relates to a larger concern with the ways in which all-purpose patterns of thinking crush the spontaneity of the moment. However, the dialectical quality of Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between whole and part, or general and particular, is sometimes lost in debates about Adorno with regard to postmodernism, because they tend to fix either on the system or on the specific. For some strands of postmodernism, therefore, Adorno’s emphasis on advanced material and his negative view of popular music exemplify outmoded modernist attitudes, while for others his attention to the particular and his condemnation of the whole anticipate many postmodernist ways of thinking. When this discrepancy is explored alongside the most fruitful aspects of Adorno’s thinking, it provides an incentive to understand postmodernism as a rereading of modernism, expanding its range and texture, and allowing once undervalued aspects to assume more significance.
One of the most important aspects of Adorno’s project, especially from the perspective of debates about postmodernism, is its insistence that aesthetic modes of experience should not be devalued on account of their incompatibility with propositional ways of thinking. The problem, however, is that Adorno’s justified concern about the dominance of propositional reason leads him not only to exaggerate correspondences between its mechanisms and those of commercial exchange value, but also to underestimate the extent to which any sense of agreement and disagreement depends on a degree of normative identity. Nevertheless, responses to Adorno have shown that the latter dimension need not be all-consuming for, as Albrecht Wellmer puts it: “Argumentation does not only entail a moving back and forth between concept and object, it also entails moving back and forth between one concept of an object and another.”12 The outcome of Wellmer’s point is that modern art is not obliged to occupy a predominantly negative space because modern subjectivity is not completely at the mercy of instrumental rationality.
A further advantage offered by Wellmer’s work is that it modifies the theologically derived idea, stemming from Walter Benjamin, that music provides glimpses of a subjectivity reconciled with nature, as would be achieved by a complete fit between concept and object. The difficulty with this proposal is that when it combines with the stronger images of reconciliation that Adorno sometimes deploys, it can serve to create an almost unbridgeable gap between art and everyday life. When, however, reconciliation is understood in a weaker sense, perhaps as hope, this gulf can be crossed without art forsaking its critical role.13 For, as Wellmer puts it:
We might thus argue that modern art brings to bear an emancipatory potential within modernity directed against the excrescences of technical and bureaucratic rationality, and thus against the dominant forms of rationality in modern society.14
It is in this sense of engaging with Adorno’s legacy that I approach the music and aesthetics of Wolfgang Rihm.
The string of performances and premieres that took place in the year of Rihm’s fiftieth birthday (2002) confirmed that he is one of the most important (and prolific) composers currently working in Europe. This judgment was corroborated in May 2003 when Rihm won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. He first came to prominence in 1974 at the Donaueschingen Music Festival with Morphonie, Sektor IV for string quartet and orchestra (1972–73), which attracted attention particularly for its concluding Mahlerian “Abgesang.” With this score the young composer distanced himself from the constructivist tendencies of high modernism, and provided a benchmark for the extreme late- and postromantic textures he was to deploy extensively in the 1970s, not least in the massive orchestral textures of Dis-Kontur (1974).
Rihm’s chamber music also engages with the past: the textures and sonorities of Musik für drei Streicher (1977), for example, combine a range of gestures, including allusions to the sound world of Beethoven’s late quartets. A wealth of references is also present in the Third String Quartet, Im Innersten (1976), noted for the late-romantic Adagio conclusion to the second movement. Rihm does not, however, seek stylistic and emotional security through these preoccupations; he is fully prepared to bring them into contact with a very different aesthetic, as the following description of what he considers to be musical freedom makes clear. “And if I recall the unfettered imagination in Beethoven’s late quartets and quickly leap to Edgard Varèse’s sculpturally-direct discovery of sound and sound-objects, then I have indicated an aesthetic of freedom through concrete musical means, which I am able to describe as the strongest influence on my own work.”15 The recontextutalization of sound Rihm envisages in these words, through an unlikely combination of cultural and tactile associations, is a continual theme in his work.
These associations are certainly evident in his stage works, amongst which the chamber opera Jakob Lenz (1977–78), an early success, serves as an example. Later on, ghosts of the past, and the ways we deal with them, became the main preoccupation of Die Hamletmaschine (1983–86), which explores how human subjectivity is formed from past traces, examines the burdens history places on us, and dramatizes the mechanics of performing particular roles. Meanwhile, Die Eroberung von Mexico (1987–91), Rihm’s second engagement with the French dramatist Antonin Artaud, thematizes failures of communication and cultural understanding.16 Interestingly, Rihm describes Die Eroberung in sculptural terms, thereby elaborating his physical sense of sound as something to be molded; indeed visual art is a strong influence on his music in all genres, often manifesting itself through a painterly sense of layers emerging and disappearing.
It is not therefore surprising to hear Rihm referring in the 1990s to over-painting, a term derived from the Austrian painter Arnulf Rainer, as a way of reworking his own music. This technique is commensurate with an aesthetic that has taken Rihm during that decade beyond the confines of the individual score to groups of scores linked by a common sensibility, as seen in the five versions of Vers une Symphonie fleuve, the group of scores constellated around Artaud’s Seraphim Theatre, and the three precursors of Jagden und Formen. As I will argue in the final section of this chapter, these multiversion works, particularly the fleuve and Formen pieces, embody the spirit of “Vers une musique informelle,” even though they push beyond the historical context of Adorno’s thinking.
Before considering Rihm’s response to this essay, I would like to reflect on the significance for him of the broader features of Adorno’s music aesthetics, as discussed in the first section. In Philosophy of New Music Adorno talks about historically advanced material in a way that is often assumed to represent the very vision of modernism rejected by the scores, such as Morphonie and Musik für drei Streicher, that brought Rihm to the fore in the 1970s. However, while jettisoning the idea of single type of material appropriate to a particular age, Rihm emphatically endorses the kind of Adornian thinking found in “The Aging” by dint not only of his unflinching commitment to musical subjectivity, but also through his awareness that, as he puts in “Der geschockte Komponist,” the new ages. 17
One might expect to turn to another composer such as Brian Ferneyhough (who, like Rihm, was a prominent figure at the Darmstadt summer courses in the 1980s) for a more authentic continuation of Adorno’s ideas along the lines of pushing compositional technique so as to create increasingly convoluted material. Indeed Ferneyhough’s use of complexity to create a type of music that is unlikely to generate stereotyped sounds (except those perhaps of complex music) does follow an Adornian imperative. Hence, in response to the suggestion that he takes an Adornian stance by resisting all commercial pressure, Ferneyhough comments as follows: “I emphatically espouse the vision of ‘material’ as being the sonic manifesting-forth of social content as a special instance of the musical techniques employed.”18 And yet Ferneyhough’s remarks elsewhere make clear that his aesthetic owes more to “Vers une musique informelle” than to Adorno’s most uncompromising statements on musical material. Moreover, if one accepts Adorno’s conviction that musical material is mediated, the interlocking complexity Ferneyhough generates, on one hand, and the diversity one hears in Rihm’s music, on the other, need not be understood as complete opposites.19
There is no doubting Rihm’s familiarity with Adorno’s writings on music, as a 2001 interview makes clear:
… as a reader of Adorno, I saw him always to be very close to practice, the practice of composing. I read this text [“Vers une musique informelle”] very often and from the very beginning had the feeling of being directly addressed: it is meant for me.20
Rihm is a prolific writer as well as composer, and his activity in this medium confirms the importance of Adorno for him — especially when the issue of music and subjectivity arises. In an essay entitled “Tonalität: Klischee — Umwertung — Versuch” (“Tonality: Cliché — Reevaluation — Attempt”) Rihm finds support in a substantial quotation from Adorno’s essay “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music:”
Among the motifs now perceptible in music of something that may come, its emancipation from language is not the last — the restoration, as it were, of its sounding, intentionless essence; the very thing that the concept of the name sought to describe, however inadequately. It is the overcoming of musical mastery over nature by way of its perfection.… The truth of music, in which it is able to go beyond language, is not the residue that remains behind after the credulously masochistic self-destruction of the subject; it could succeed only if the subject were also positively sublated (aufgehoben) in post-linguistic music.21
Rihm adds to this: “The essence of music — ‘sounding and intentionless’ — still something other than the illusion of subjectless objectivity.…”22 By doing so he, in effect, turns Adorno toward his own experience of music, for he seems to find in Adorno’s words a way to address music as sound rather than structured system. Indeed, the essay dates from a time (1985–86) when Rihm was engaged on his Chiffre cycle (1982–88), comprising nine scores (including Bild). In this context it is easy to see how Rihm might have related Adorno’s words about music as a “sounding, intentionless essence” to what he describes in a note to the first seven Chiffre pieces as a “search for sound-objects [Klangobjekte], for sound-signs [Klangzeichen], for a sound-writing [Klangschrift].”23
What Adorno appears to be saying in the extended passage from which the above quotation is taken is that as music moves away from language, so its intentionless essence emerges; but at the same time “music’s own characters, which developed alongside language,” cannot simply be discarded because it is impossible to remove music from its history in order to discover its pure form.24 Clearly, Rihm does not present this argument in all its subtlety, nevertheless it is revealing when related to Rihm’s own output. For this composer consistently holds in tension two approaches to music: (1) that it is a medium resistant to linguistic meaning, and (2) that it can deploy historical material in a semiotic fashion as signs.
In his essay from 1985 “Spur, Faden: Zur Theorie des musikalischen Handwerks” (“Trace, Thread: On the Theory of Musical Craft”), Rihm returns to the intersection of musical events and subjectivity. Maintaining that his technique is a compulsion that does not derive from choice, Rihm comments:
This sort of compulsion exists because art is “not merely the announcement [Kundgabe] of subjectivity” (as Adorno once put it). The compulsion exists more strongly for music, since the announcement of subjectivity cannot be the essence of the musical art. This is because subjectivity is a prerequisite for the musical announcement, that is, subjectivity already plays a decisive role in the process of articulation, and hence cannot be its only goal.25
Here again Rihm taps (without direct citation) Adorno’s critique of high modernist construction. The context in which Adorno is invoked here is informative, since Rihm is speaking in a rather personal way about the corporality of his craft, suggesting that he works with material in a physical way akin to the way a sculptor molds clay. The sense of following the material where it wants to go is Adornian, because it envisages the composer immersed in his material. Thus it is commensurate with Adorno’s contention that, “[I]f it is indeed time for a renewed turn toward subjectivity in music, this cannot be expected to come from subjective intentions.”26 Nevertheless, the view of material as a medium to be molded by the body (with its strong sculptural implications) stems directly from Rihm. This commitment to an irreducible corporal, or presymbolic, subjectivity is not necessarily incommensurate with Adornian thinking, but it becomes less compatible when Rihm is driven to assume that subjectivity exists before the compositional act. This is because Rihm’s perspective (on this occasion) lacks an Adornian understanding of how subjectivity is shaped by the historical content of musical material.
Adorno finds so many problems with direct manifestations of subjectivity, because for him the administered world creates a damaging uniformity by imposing preformed categories on people. According to the critique of the culture industry developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, popular music is yet another manifestation of this standardization. Therefore, in circumstances whereby popular music is bathed in a fake immediacy, any art music able to reject such homogeneity becomes a form of negation. In a significant way Rihm shares Adorno’s hope that music can disrupt the administered world, but he assigns to it a less negative role than Adorno was willing to countenance by placing his faith in the direct impact of music. Hence Rihm speaks of not of construction and negation but of energy, which accords with his somatic approach to music. In his essay, “Musikalishe Freiheit” (“Musical Freedom”), he notes that “the task of art in repressive times is to be not just a refuge, but a repository of energy.”27
The same essay also finds Rihm talking of a “type of wild thinking in music,” though he quickly adds that musical freedom and wild thinking in music are not necessarily the same thing, because wild thinking often depends on atavistic predispositions. 28 By contrast, free thinking (the explaining of premises) is therefore not only a vague knowing, but also a “deeply learned intuition” (Ahnungsfähigkeit).29 This statement, at least, can be reconciled with Adorno’s dialectic of mimesis and construction, whereby a gestural, shamanistic part of ourselves crosses over with the rational media of construction in the process of composition. Here Adorno explains the process: “Expression is already the rationalization of the gestural, that is, its objectification through signification, through ‘symbolic function’, the unmediated through the mediated.”30
It is reasonable to conclude that Rihm experiences this tension, but his comments about music as an energy store indicate that he does not hold it in quite the balance Adorno recommends. This is especially true when he starts talking of music as “the inner foreign land,” as a way of suggesting that music gains access to something unfamiliar to our accustomed sense of self.31 This idea has interesting associations with Julia Kristeva’s Lacanian notion of chora, or pulsions, understood as quantities of energy. The chora moves through the not-yet-constituted body; once a subject has become part of the symbolic order, however, the continued presence of such pulsions is felt, predominantly, by means of pressure on language through apparently meaningless gaps, silences, and other disruptions. Thus when Rihm speaks of music as the other, we can conclude that he is describing its capacity to deal with those things that are excluded by a propositional form of rationality. Doing so, he finds the resources of subjectivity less impaired than Adorno’s aesthetics maintain.
It is surely this preoccupation with the presymbolic that accounts for the strong influence of Artaud on Rihm — evident so far in the group of Tutuguri scores (which include some of Rihm’s most atavistic music), in the music drama Die Eroberung von Mexico, and in the collection of pieces grouped around the idea of Seraphim Theatre. Artaud’s emphasis on the production of language and sound is a clear theme when Rihm, speaking of problems of translation in Die Eroberung, comments: “[T]he whole machinery of linguistic mechanics (breath, throat, lingual, labial, etc.) lies over the instrumental sound like an acoustical film.”32 This remark invites reference to Roland Barthes’s well-known, Kristeva-inspired, essay “The Grain of the Voice,” in which he contemplates how a singing voice can have access to what is often excluded by approaches to language focused exclusively on semantics.33 Furthermore, by addressing the nonsemantic qualities of language, Rihm also touches on the capacity of music to be nonsubstitutable, irreplaceable, and resistant to algorithm.34 In this sense music is a medium that cannot be translated into something else; and this is one of the qualities Rihm has in mind when he talks about music as something other, thereby evoking what Adorno considers to be the unquantifiable qualities that resist the kind of exchangeability valued by the music industry.
Thus Rihm is able to tap greater resources of raw feeling than Adorno envisaged, yet without completely discrediting Adorno’s suspicion of musical immediacy. Indeed the latter perspective might well find the Adagio gestures of the sprawling Third Symphony (1976–77) both excessive and nostalgic. Nevertheless, context and judgment are important here to understand the historical location of this score in relation to the constructionist aesthetic it so obviously discards. Furthermore, one needs to heed what Rihm himself frequently says about his music, not least in the following well-known quotation from his notes to Morphonie: “Music must be full of emotion, the emotion full of complexity.”35 The implication of this statement is that Rihm uses romanticism against modernist systems, but by distorting romanticism he also inoculates it against comfort. For while the gestures of Rihm’s music from the 1970s frequently belong to the nineteenth, or early twentieth century, the emotions they generate are those of the late twentieth century. This is in no small measure because the expressive meaning of earlier gestures changes when they are placed in a new organizational dynamic. Significantly, Rihm’s notes to Morphonie contain the rather Adornian suggestion that: “The form itself is an expressive value.”36
The meanings of existing materials change when their signifying mechanisms are altered. Rihm’s demonstrates this alteration in his Klavierstück no. 7, where the monorhythmic octave opening proclaims that emotional intensity is everything. After a frenzied passage in a dotted rhythm, the climax of the music breaks into obsessively repeated E頷-major chords (bars 179–83). One might expect this triadic passage to offer some sort of security or respite. Yet it achieves the reverse because the sheer violence of the gestures — a passage which crescendos from pp to fff is marked “krachend” (thunderous) — renders it the most dissonant passage in the piece.37
Both this piece and the Klavierstück no. 6 (1977–88) juxtapose material in direct ways indebted not only to modernist influences (including that of Rihm’s one-time teacher Karlheinz Stockhausen), but also to the nineteenth-century aesthetic of the fragment and to the related practice of parataxis. Adorno’s essay “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” describes how the poet deploys this practice as a way of ensuring that meaning does not freeze into rigid patterns. Doing so, the essay provides an interesting perspective on its author’s own style of writing. Adorno writes:
In a manner reminiscent of Hegel, mediation of the vulgar kind, a middle element standing outside the moments it is to connect, is eliminated as being external and inessential, something that occurs frequently in Beethoven’s late style; this not least of all gives Hölderlin’s late poetry its anticlassicistic quality, its rebellion against harmony.38
Taking Hölderlin at his most aphoristic, Rihm’s Hölderlin-Fragmente for voice and piano (1976–77), which shares material with Klavierstück no. 6, avoids transitions in just the way Adorno describes. But beyond this immediate context the paratactic principle is important for a wide range of Rihm’s music, not least those scores deriving from the 1980s in which blocks of sound stand separated by intervening silences. Implicit in the aesthetic of the fragment is a sense that separate components could be reconfigured to create new constellations of relationships. Adorno’s more dogmatic assertions about Stravinsky’s brand of intertextuality notwithstanding, such multiple possibilities are a manifestation of his acute awareness of how the meaning of an object changes when it is placed in an unfamiliar context.
Such reconfiguration is a central principle of Rihm’s Fremde Szenen I–III, a set of piano trios (subtitled Versuche für Klaviertrio, erste folge) written between 1982 and 1984, which evokes in an idiosyncratic way the music of Robert Schumann. This title presumably alludes to the first number of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, entitled “Von fremden Ländern und Menschen.” In his program notes Rihm talks of an archaic medium, dominated by a piece of furniture that is still with us; and taking his cue from the word “chamber,” he also speaks of deserted rooms in which the forbidden can take place. He is clear that only the tone of Schumann is used, none of his actual music; and instead of desiring security in period costume, he seeks the strangeness of a previously inhabited space. In this music Rihm explores Schumann in two main ways: as a kindred spirit searching for an expressive medium and as a strange voice or language with which one can become acquainted.39 Rihm therefore taps the emotion in Schumann, but he also distorts some stylistic elements beyond a state in which they can signify in their traditional sense. As a result these components become sound-objects that are more suggestive of modernist fragmentation than of neoromanticism.
Fremde Szene II is subtitled Charakterstück, and carries the tempo indication Rasch [und schwankend]. Rasch (fast) is a tempo marking frequently used by Schumann and schwankend (swaying) refers to a quality that Rihm particularly values in Schumann’s music. For it is this latter characteristic which enables Rihm to connect Schumann’s romantic, nineteenth-century subjectivity with a late twentieth-century sense of self.
The way in which Rihm works is not unlike a form of criticism that modifies an object as it interacts with it. Hence one might hear this music as a constellation in which the style of Schumann becomes transformed by a range of contexts, and in which Rihm’s gestures, likewise, are altered by the proximity of Schumann. From the perspective of Rihm’s interest in visual art, this music paints a layer over Schumann and simultaneously modifies the underlying surface. There is thus a creative tension, which is transferred to both performers and listeners, between Rihm as a composer who creates and modifies meanings, and Rihm as an interpreter who inhabits existing meanings. Therefore the sense of self that emerges in this music cannot be separated from the material in which it is embedded.40
This amalgam of romantic and modern subjectivity enables Rihm to draw a certain mobility from Schumann, and yet concurrently to take it beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century form. It is as if Rihm has taken Adorno’s view that when we interpret music we do so from the perspective of our own age, and then turned it into a compositional principle. He thereby exceeds the actuality of Adorno’s aesthetics, while expanding on the suggestion that music acquires different meanings in different contexts.
Extensive reworking of his own material is characteristic of Rihm’s music in the 1990s, notably in those scores that comprise, respectively, the fleuve cycle, the Formen group, and the Seraphim collection. The second tendency from this time, as suggested by the title Vers une Symphonie fleuve, is the sense of flow and movement, frequently indicated by score markings. The idea of motion, applied to the fleuve and Formen groups, relates not only to movement within this music, but also to a flooding beyond boundaries, or to a pushing beyond the confines of a single score.
These scores are directly associated with the idea of Übermalung, a term that Rihm uses, following the example of Arnulf Rainer, to describe the process of adding layers to existing music. Vers une Symphonie fleuve I (1992/95), for example, adds a string layer to an existing piece, et nunc (1992) for wind and percussion. The new stratum that creates fleuve I fills in the islands of sound that characterize et nunc, thereby transforming a piece about associations of sound into one characterized by flow and movement, as the frequent Bewegung markings indicate. The result is that the existing object is modified because it is partly submerged and because what is heard is presented in a new context.41 The modifications between the five versions of fleuve are varied: Rihm paints on new surfaces, modifies the orchestration, thickens and thins textures, and adds and deletes passages of varying sizes. The progression from fleuve III to IV, for example, is extreme: the latter piece takes a block from the former, lasting from measure 160 to the end, and surrounds it with new music. Situated in fleuve IV, the block from fleuve III lasts from bars 101 to 350 of the later score (bars 347–49 are transitional since the concluding chords of fleuve III trail off beneath a powerful superimposed string melody which continues into the next section). Consequently, the added sections in fleuve IV include the opening rising sequences, marked “in unruhig fließender Bewegung,”42 and the material that intensifies the climactic end of fleuve III, leading to the slow, quite final section and the eventual return of the opening sequences. Further modifications and insertions continue with fleuve V, which includes plans for the symphonic river to engulf a separate piece, Spiegel und Fluss (1999).43 The overall conception is of a symphonic river, fed by numerous tributaries.
One of the influences Rihm mentions in his note to fleuve I is Hubert Fichte’s notion of a roman fleuve (flowing novel), as exemplified by his seventeen-volume Geschichte der Empfindlichkeit. Fichte’s example, however, functions less as a concrete model for Rihm than as an idea that fires his imagination. When Rihm says, for example, that “figures and situations appear, disappear and reappear again…,”44 he draws attention not only to Fichte, but also to the painterly way that elements surface and submerge in his music. He also evokes Adorno’s description of the manner in which the thematic figures in Mahler’s symphonies change their identities in ways comparable to characters in a novel.
In Mahler, conversely [as compared to the classical model], the thematic figure is no more indifferent to the symphonic flow than are the characters in a novel to the dimension of time within which they act. Driven on by impulses, as the same beings they yet become different, shrink, expand, even age.45
As a consequence, the underlying image of a novel provided by Fichte, and supported by Adorno’s understanding of Mahler, serves to link the idea of movement, derived from the natural image of a river, to the concept of a fluid human subjectivity.
The title Vers une Symphonie fleuve provides a strong hint that Adorno’s “Vers une musique informelle” was an influence on this music. As in the case of Fichte’s novel, the composer uses Adorno’s essay primarily as a stimulus for his own creativity. This said, it is worth emphasizing the importance for Rihm of Schoenberg’s preserial works, since these pieces play a significant role in Adorno’s essay, informing the prospect that modern music might be able to dissolve the categories of traditional music so as to reinvent them without restrictions attached. Adorno’s understanding of Mahler is also pertinent in this regard, because, for him, Mahler attains a degree of freedom comparable to that achieved by Schoenberg’s preserial scores, not by suspending tonality but by creating new meanings for established procedures.
What characterizes is, for that very reason [a lack of navité], no longer simply what it is, but, as the word character intends, a sign. Mahler drew his functional characters — what each individual part contributes to the form — from the stock of traditional music. But they are used autonomously, without regard to their place in the established pattern. He can therefore invent melodies that clearly have the character of sequels, essences of the closing themes of sonata form.46
The idea of finding new uses for conventional musical topoi is important for understanding Rihm’s willingness in the 1990s, and earlier, to use such features as signs that refer to established functions yet which are not organized by them. Such redeployment is certainly in line with the process of dissipating and reworking established forms that Adorno advocates in “Vers une musique informelle.”
For a more contemporary sense of “form in progress,” Pierre Boulez’s tendency to extend material and continually to revise pieces provides an obvious point of comparison. The difference is that Boulez’s approach to multidimensional proliferation, as for example heard in Répons, has its roots in serial thinking, whereas Rihm’s expansive tendencies resist systematic unfolding.47 But beyond this distinction, Boulez’s idea of the-work-in-progress certainly has affinities with the protean qualities of the fleuve cycle. Even if it is only fleuve IV (or V) that eventually establishes itself in the repertoire, there is undoubtedly something to be gained from listening to the ways that different versions of the fleuve idea generate new latencies from similar underlying material. Because these fleuve pieces can be thought of both as individuals and as a group, they suggest an experience of subjectivity that can flow freely between individual and collective identities.
Pursuing forms in multiple directions is the underlying theme in Jagden und Formen (1995/2001) and its associated scores: Gejagte Form (1995/96), Verborgene Formen (1995/97), and Gedrängte Form (1995/98). Like the fleuve cycle, these pieces share and modify material, and yet Jagden und Formen is a culmination of the earlier pieces in a way that is not comparable with the later versions of the fleuve cycle. The means by which Jagden und Formen incorporates previous scores are anything but straightforward: it reorders both large and small sections, repeats material, includes new insertions, and adds a rhythmically distinct brass motif as a form of punctuation.
Nor do the complexities stop here because of the reworking of material in the component works. Gedrängte Form is, for example, clearly derived from Verborgene Formen — as signified by the prominent writing for English horn in both scores. Instead of recombining sections of the earlier work, Rihm takes the soloistic viola line from Verborgene Formen, sometimes coupled with its former doubling on the cello, and runs it through a large part of Gedrängte Form, thereby building the score around this strand. The end result is that the line, in dialogue principally with the English horn and (to a lesser extent) the flute, becomes enveloped in a new texture. When Gedrängte Form occurs in Jagden und Formen, it is already a version of Verborgene Formen, and it is therefore not surprising that bar 161 of Jagden und Formen can effect a transition from Verborgene Formen to Gedrängte Form without any intervening material.
The idea of hunting for form has something of a musique informelle about it, suggesting that form is not pregiven, but that it is instead pursued and comes into being in the process of that pursuit. This is certainly how Rihm chooses to understand the matter:
Form and self — these are two forms that one has to work towards, dynamically and processually. In other words, in time and with time. And, of course, this is particularly true of music. Like the “self”, “form” does not exist a priori. Both have to be created. And both remain in a state of change.48
The implication is that form cannot be established in advance because it derives from immersion in material. This stance is, of course, congruent with Adorno’s insistence, both in his philosophy and in his music criticism, that form should emerge from smaller units, so that the overall form does not control the inner life of its constituents. Part of this flexibility for Rihm is achieved through the process of forgetting, since, as he puts it: “Forgetting a process and putting it behind one is part of the process itself.”49 Furthermore, he manages to align the idea of hunting and pursuit with the notion of evolving form when he suggests that both form and self undergo a certain unfurling: “The hunt is about form, the hunt is the form.”50
Clearly, any of the fleuve or Formen pieces can be listened to as a composition in its own right, without knowledge of the related pieces. And yet the related senses of flow and of mobile form both point beyond the boundaries of the self-contained whole, suggesting that the material is not restricted to a single configuration because in different circumstances it will produce different results. Put in more abstract (Adornian) terms, these scores attempt to combine (though without “reconciling”) identity and non-identity, autonomy and heterogeneity. Of course, Adorno already places musical material beyond the confines of the autonomous individual score because he understands it as sedimented subjectivity, even though he also hears musical subjectivity unfolding at the level of the work. The interesting thing about Rihm’s multiple versions of pieces is that they actively engage this Adornian understanding of subjectivity and material. The distinct yet related forms of these pieces interact with each other beyond the boundaries of each individual manifestation, suggesting, on one hand, that the self can achieve more than one appearance and indicating, on the other, that the self is dependent on other subjectivities. As Rihm’s remark about an analogous search for form and self indicates, neither the self nor the intersubjective social forms it inhabits are fixed; both can be reconfigured and both are more of a process than a fixed form. Listening to this music, one experiences the multiple processes of immediate consciousness, and encounters the varying responses these produce at the level of form.
It was argued earlier that Adorno makes problematic any easy distinction between modernism and postmodernism; the same is true of Rihm because he offers, not a wholesale rejection of modernism, but an enrichment of it. German debates over postmodernism in music identified Rihm from his earliest appearance as a postmodernist composer,51 principally because he was seen as a neoromantic opposed to modernist constructivist values. As the postmodernism debate and Rihm’s career have advanced, however, understandings of both have changed. Rihm’s links to modernism have become increasingly evident, while postmodernism has come to be understood as “expanding the interior space of modernity,” not surpassing it.52 This sense of an expanded modernism is in keeping with the suggestion that Rihm’s inclusive aesthetic is more advantageously seen as an extension of a previous generation’s concerns than as a negation of them. And this point is especially true of Rihm’s relationship with Adorno, since the latter always insisted on understanding music as a medium of subjectivity.
It is perhaps better to understand Rihm as observing the spirit of Adorno’s aesthetic more than the letter, particularly since Rihm’s sense of musical immediacy does not always mix well with Adorno’s thinking. Moreover, the notion of historically advanced material created problems for Adorno himself, so there is little sense in advocating it as a way of comprehending Rihm. But Adorno’s related awareness of how musical subjectivity ages is more valuable because his approach leaves space for the new latencies that Rihm finds in traditional material. Fredric Jameson has emphasized this aspect of Adorno’s thinking; he remarks that “it is not a matter of new materials so much as the continuous invention of new taboos on the older positivities.”53
Put more affirmatively, Adorno, working at the level of criticism, finds new subjectivities by harnessing the emancipatory potential of bourgeois art, while expanding the hermeneutic frame in which it operates. It is reasonable to argue therefore that Rihm, primarily through composition but also through associated music criticism, modifies and augments this legacy. Certainly, the principle that form, whether conceptual or musical, should arise from immersion in musical material is paramount for both figures. In the subjectivities embodied by Rihm’s music we experience strongly the sense of inhabiting existing meanings, while modifying them and creating new ones; we also encounter an Adornian sensitivity to what is excluded by a dominant form of rationality.