B1 Non-refereed article in a scientific journal

Erik Bergman and the Subject of Composing




AuthorsJuha Torvinen

Publication year2012

JournalMitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung

Volume25

First page 18

Last page23


Abstract

In his article, "The Echo of The Subject", the French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe ponders a connection between a "musical obsession" and an "autobiographical compulsion" by analyzing psychoanalyst Theodor Reik's book The Haunting Melody. Lacoue-Labarthe focuses on an involuntary and recurrent reminiscence of a musical fragment, "a tune in one's head" that "keeps coming back" without any clear and present cause. A "haunting" musical reverberation seems to spring from a personal history and becomes, thus, "an echo of the subject" calling for self-analysis: why precisely this tune, why here and now, and what keeps it coming back? I will focus here on the Finnish modernist Erik Bergman (1911–2011) by musing on his composer profile and listening on its unchanging features as "echoes" of subjectivity. 



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