VINKO GLOBOKAR, OR, THE EFFORT TO WRITE MATERIALIST MUSIC

Modern music is thoroughly and truly atheist, materialist, not in the sense of heroic defiance of God, but in the irrelevance of the divine.

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In what precise sense can music be materialist? Vinko Globokar, a Slovenian contemporary composer who worked mostly in France and Germany, provides an adequate answer to this question.

Music, at its most elementary, is an act of supplication: a call to a figure of the Big Other (beloved Lady, King, God...) to respond, not as the symbolic Big Other, but in the reality of his or her being (breaking his own rules by showing mercy; conferring her contingent love on us...). Music is thus an attempt to provoke the "answer of the Real": to give rise in the Other to the "miracle" of which Lacan speaks apropos of love—the miracle of the Other stretching back his or her hand to me. The historical changes in the status of the "Big Other" (grosso modo, in what Hegel referred to as "objective Spirit") thus directly concern music. Perhaps musical modernity designates the moment when music renounces the endeavor to provoke the answer of the Other. Modern music is thoroughly and truly atheist, MATERIALIST, not in the sense of the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of the heroic defiance of God, but in the sense of the insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner:

"Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided—you need a God."

Brecht is right here: we are never in a position to directly choose between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. “Atheism” (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserably pathetic stance for those who long for God but cannot find him (or who “rebel against God”). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant. What this means is something much more radical than it may appear: there is no one to turn to, to address, to bear witness to, no one to receive our plea or lament. This position is extremely difficult to sustain. In modern music, Webern was the first who was able to sustain this inexistence of the Other: even Schoenberg was still composing for a future ideal listener, while Webern accepted that there is no "proper" listener. And Globokar belongs to this line.