After Beethoven, After Hegel: Legacies of Selfhood in Schnittke's String Quartet No. 4

Music can articulate ideas of selfhood, as is often illustrated with regard to the 'Heroic' works of Beethoven, and the relationship found between Beethoven's music and Hegel's philosophy. Alfred Schnittke confronts this tradition in aspects of his String Quartet No. 4 (1989), a work that highlights contemporary music's subtle and complex relationship with the entangled histories of both music and philosophy. In the second movement of his quartet, figures of musical closure, as metonymie symbols of musical and subjective self-coherence, are taken as a discursive starting point, as images of an objectified self. Contradictions within this symbolic presentation of selfhood are then opened up dialectically. In so doing, a critical exploration of self-understanding -of its process, reifications, and paradoxes -is performed musically.