B1 Non-refereed article in a scientific journal
Erik Bergman and the Subject of Composing
Authors: Juha Torvinen
Publication year: 2012
Journal: Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung
Volume: 25
First page : 18
Last page: 23
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.