ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the respective conceptions of Derrida's supplementarity and Kofi Agawu's topicality perform intrinsic agencies in Tamara Levitz's revision of Stravinsky's Persephone. Levitz entangles the anthropological aspects of the Persephone myth with the nonconformist traits amongst the artists themselves. In the case of Andre Jolivet, who like Beethoven is Catholic by birth, his devotion to religion is less fervent than, say, that of Olivier Messiaen or Schoenberg. Instead of the neoclassical Stravinsky, Messiaen alluded to the Classical Beethoven as being the greatest of all: someone who 'loved', 'suffered' and whose music 'speaks from his heart'. The chapter suggests that Jolivet's hermeneutic method foreshadows that of Levitz in terms of its ordering the musical and vital 'topics' to accord with paradigmatic forms of 'alterity'. Regardless of his ability to differentiate between the aesthetics and the temporalities of the other person or culture, this alterity, which is already imagined, takes on a symbolic process of supplementarity.
