'Write the moment': two ways of dealing with Wolfgang Rihm 1

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Brodsky, Seth

It is important for me to write the moment that is truly hic et mine, here and now, and also the moment between the two.1

How TO DEAL WITH WOLFGANG RiHM? You don't have to, but in the room of contemporary European composition he 's something of the elephant. In Germany alone he gets hundreds of performances a year and, subsequently, a great deal of press. But you have to think proportionately about this: Rihm gives as much as he gets. By the time he turned 50 in 2002, he had over 400 scores and 1ooo published pages of words to his name. He has been celebrated for a miraculous Produktivkraft, branded a Vielschreiber ('hack'), and placed in the thin air of Germany's highest cultural peaks, next to Hegel and Ernst Bloch.

Even Beethoven: when Rihm received the coveted Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2003, the committee declared that his work 'bears witness to a faith in the indestructibility of the creative individual who can maintain strength and dignity in the face of outside perils'. Rihm appears to fight the good fight; Rihm struggles. But his fight has produced a marvellous mess, worlds away from a Beethovenian 'search for order'. Too many notes, too many words, and an author who makes declarations like this one: 'I am for chaos, for bringing something forth out of chaos which, countering chaos with chaos, can generate more chaos; really a more anarchic approach.'2

Dealing with Wolfgang Rihm needs really a less anarchic approach - one that blithely walks into this chaos-generating chaos, seizes an isolated object, and holds on to it until it begins to illuminate itself. Reinhold Brinkmann executes this turn ideally in his Siemens Prize Laudatio for Rihm.3 Following his speech's title - 'Catchwords, snapshots, quotes' - Brinkmann confronts the sprawling Rihmian cosmos by intercepting a set of its own singular objects, and going on to constellate them. Catchwords like 'crisis', 'reception', and 'espressivo'; snapshots like that of Rihm walking down the street, deaf to his own name as he feverishly composes in his head; quotes like 'If there is a tradition to which I feel I belong, then it is this: art as freedom to understand, born out of freedom and obliged to freedom.'4

I follow Brinkmann's strategy. But I want to seize only one object from the Rihmian cosmos, the catchword 'moment' - or more specifically, the German word Moment, which means both 'instant' and 'part'. This double-coded, paradoxical 'moment' is one of the most insistent figures in Rihm's thought and work; when, in 2001, he declares to Pierre Gervasoni his need to 'write the moment that is truly here and now, and also the moment between the two', Rihm is troping on a master-trope.

The two essays which follow, in this and the Winter MT, take this double-moment literally. The first essay examines a 'here and now'. It takes an isolated 'instant' in Rihm's music - a catastrophic moment from his 1982 score Tutuguri- and attempts to unpack it, to let it reverberate. The second essay, 'between the two', scans many such moments from a bird's-eye view, exploring them as 'parts' within the changing 'whole ' of Rihm's career thus far, from the early orchestral Sub-Kontur (1976) through the recently completed ensemble work Jagden und Formen (2001).

The 'paradoxical moment' is, of course, more than a master-trope for just Rihm; it is a venerable figure within the German music tradition from Beethoven on. Berthold Hoeckner's new book Programming the absolute is only the most recent to practice a 'hermeneutics of the moment' on the 'long 19th century' from Beethoven to Schoenberg. But Hoeckner's book is remarkable for the intensity with which he pursues the inherent contradiction of the musical moment, a contradiction he condenses at one point to a memorable aphorism: 'However short the instant, it may touch eternity; and however minute the detail, it may encompass all.'5

Hoeckner's is a melancholy project; paraphrasing Adorno, he proclaims his book 'a gesture of solidarity with the metaphysics of German music at the moment of its fall'. In focusing on Wolfgang Rihm's music at the many moments of its many falls, I hope to suggest that 'the metaphysics of German music' itself has hardly fallen. Rihm's endless train of ruptured 'parts' is also an attempt to 'encompass all'. And in a single catastrophic 'instant' in Tutuguri, Rihm has the nerve to try and 'touch eternity'. How to deal with Wolfgang Rihm? Perhaps as he himself deals with his music, 'moment by moment'.

First Way: 'here and now '

1. Nerve and nerve

'Nerve' is a tricky term. In the most literal sense, as part of the body, it swings back and forth, its health and torment. In language, nerve is its own opposite. It is coolness and panic, concentration and its loss. 'Having nerve ' is a really stymieing phrase: nerve is bravery and impudence, necessary courage and insufferable cockiness. When Wolfgang Rihm maintains that 'I am, after all, a composer who composes with nerve-ends and not only with the pencil', he hits the nerve of 'nerve'. The noun bounds in both directions at once.6