| This is the first full-length English-language study on the music of Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952), a German who has been increasingly recognized as among the leading composers of our time. This study represents an “interpretive understanding” of Rihm's music. Instead of paraphrasing Rihm's musical language through applying traditional analytical tools, this seven-chapter study examines Rihm's compositional thinking, by discussing the musical and extra-musical creative sources that have had a direct influence on the formalization of his idiom.;The individuals to be discussed in this study as having an effect on Rihm's composition include Theodor Adorno, Heiner Müller, and Antonin Artaud. Adorno's writings, especially those discussing his notion of “constellation,” are of primary significance for discussion of “musical form” as found in Rihm's music. Through applying this sociologically-oriented notion, I argue for a renewed understanding of musical unity as crucial for Rihm's concept of musical form. My discussion of Müller and Artaud centers on Rihm's development of the concept of Musiktheater [music-theater]. Rihm regards two of his representative works, Die Hamletmaschine (1983–6) and Die Eroberung von Mexiko (1987–91), as belonging to this genre, in which Rihm proposes that dramaturgical and musical “events” take place as the aggregation of disjunct moments that shed light on one object. In this discussion, Müller's “synthetic fragments” and Artaud's concepts of “gender” and “the physical” are paid particular attention.;As key aspects to understanding the historical and aesthetic contexts of Rihm's composition, this study also includes examination of the significance of compositional system and of Körperlichkeit [“physicality”]. In discussion of the first topic, I argue that Rihm's aversion to the post-war structuralist aesthetics is not as clear-cut as has widely been believed. The second topic is central to Rihm's approach to compositional process. In particular, a certain parallel between music and painting is discussed to support my argument that, in Rihm's composition, a compositional outcome and its traces are often found as and in one concept. Rihm's musical world emerges as one in which the apparent stylistic incongruities are part of a consistent picture, a product of his wide-ranging intellectual roots. |
