• From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious
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From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

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What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? In this unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music, Seth Brodsky focuses on the unlikely year 1989, when New Music hardly tak...
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  • 24 January 2017
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What happened to musical modernism? When did it end? Did it end? In this unorthodox Lacanian account of European New Music, Seth Brodsky focuses on the unlikely year 1989, when New Music hardly takes center stage. Instead one finds Rostropovich playing Bach at Checkpoint Charlie; or Bernstein changing “Joy” to “Freedom” in Beethoven’s Ninth; or David Hasselhoff lip-synching “Looking for Freedom” to thousands on New Year’s Eve. But if such spectacles claim to master their historical moment, New Music unconsciously takes the role of analyst. In so doing, it restages earlier scenes of modernism. As world politics witnesses a turning away from the possibility of revolution, musical modernism revolves in place, performing century-old tasks of losing, failing, and beginning again, in preparation for a revolution to come.
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Price: $75.00
Pages: 368
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date: 24 January 2017
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520279360
Format: Hardcover
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"Brodsky is never less than virtuosic in conveying maximum authority on a huge range of complex and often difficult-to-access material. While creating no expectations of gazetteer-like comprehensiveness, Brodsky links detailed technical accounts of compositional contexts to his wider topics concerning modernism and the unconscious."

— Arnold Whittall

What Brodsky ultimately seeks to find in the tangled web of allusion and citation he pulls together here is not so much freedom as a kind of scalpel to cut cords that bind the modern project to the very notion of a future—of the “new"—and thereby condemn it to repeat the past. lt's a project he acknowledges as more or less impossible, but perhaps no less worthy for all that.

— Robert Barry

"Brodsky’s brilliant and engaging book...opens the way for a rethinking of musical modernism.... It is a virtue of From 1989 that the questions it raises provoke still more."


"With refreshing, indeed swashbuckling ambition, From 1989 seeks out the meaning of musical modernism. . . . From the rubble of Schoenberg and Mahler, mortared using the wreckage of Lacan and Adorno, Brodsky constructs a fantastical theoretical cathedral — a 'monument of its own magnificence' (to use Years's phrase) rather than a building for uncritical worship."


"In bringing together music, history, psychoanalysis, critical theory and ‘New Modernist Studies’, From 1989 draws on a vast range of perspectives and sources. As an exploration of psychoanalytic ideas in counterpoint with the New Music and events of the late twentieth century, this book will be of interest to a reader already immersed in both disciplines."


"[Brodsky’s book] displays remarkable care. Its greatest treasure is namely a profound knowledge of tradition and of cultural-historical contexts, which, moreover, is given a broad foundation by sharp analytical observations on many works."

— Stefan Drees
Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “But supposing He does not come”

PART ONE. FREE
1. Drei Phantasiestücke (1)
2. Fantasy & Fantasy (1)
3. Drei Phantasiestücke (2)
4. Fantasy & Fantasy (2)
5. Drei Phantasiestücke (3)

PART TWO. NEW
6. Freiheitsdreck (1)
7. Music & New Music (1)
8. Fantasy & Fantasy (3)
9. Freiheitsdreck (2)
10. Freiheitsdreck (3)

PART THREE. AGAIN
11. Repetition (1)
12. Repetition (2)
13. Repetition (3)
14. Repetition (4)
15. Music & New Music (2)

Notes
Index