From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious [Hardcover]

What happened to musical modernism? When did it end?Didit 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.

Seth Brodskyis Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

“In brilliant dialectical prose, Brodsky shows how European postwar modernist music reflected, nourished, negated, and demolished the discourse surrounding the tumultuous but peaceful revolutions of 1989. He perches on the edge of the volcano’s crater, holding tightly to the edge while using the elevation to survey the surrounding landscape, with works as far back as Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Schoenberg’sErwartungcoming into view.”—Anne C. Shreffler, Harvard University
 
“Brilliantly written and argued,From 1989is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of European musical modernism, and Brodsky, its nimble Lacanian analyst. Capacious, insightful, erudite, witty, paradoxical, and whip-smart, it is simply like nothing else in musicology today. It must be read.”—Brian Kane, author ofSound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice

“Habermas famously claimed that EnlightenmenlÓH