Le 28 juin 2017
de 11h30 à 12h00
Le Patio (université de Strasbourg)
22 rue René Descartes, 67000 Strasbourg
salle 3202
Séance - Contrasting Paths to Modernism: Bartók, Skalkottas and Christou
Pré-acte / Acte
Auteur : Petros Vouvaris
The empathetic emphasis put on Nikos Skalkottas’s portrayal as a melancholy subject is common to most biographical accounts of his life (hi)story. In fact, investing in Skalkottas’s melancholy has been instrumental in validating his genius, a common illocutionary commitment of all scholarly attempts to secure his position in the canon. What has not as yet been thoroughly investigated is the way Skalkottas’s melancholy plays into our understanding of his music and his music into our understanding of melancholy. The aim of this paper is to interpretively approach three of Skalkottas’s 16 Songs for mezzo‐soprano and piano (his most substantial contribution to the song genre) as melancholy objects in an attempt to capture both something of this music as the product of a melancholy subject and something of the sound of melancholy under the inescapable sign of the subject. Admitting the heuristic fiction of the musical work as subject on the grounds of being entangled in comparable orders of symbolic necessity, the interpretation of the structural narrative of Skalkottas’s songs adopts a Lacanian perspective. Thereby, the analyses track the “stain” on the music’s symbolic order that disrupts the automatism of its signifying chain. By identifying symbolic gestures of renouncing desire, diatonic surfeits as revelling in surplus jouissance, and uncanny returns as succumbing to the death drive, I read Skalkottas’s insistence to compose with no hope of having his works performed and appreciated as a manifestation of his sublimating attempt to aim for a symbolic life beyond his biological death and to (re)invent himself as subject qua music.
