An unspoken mystery haunts From 1989: why, after so many shifts in critical taste and so many cultural revolutions, does musical modernism endure? Seth Brodsky's monumental effort maps the entwined destinies of music, psychoanalysis, modernism, and the year 1989. In one sense it explains the curious survival of European musical modernism as a persistent itch beneath the skin of our dominant musical culture. The introduction models the oblique line of argumentation that will follow, as questions that hover over select musical works or performances open out into a larger dialogue. Thus Brodsky's forced choice one Berlin evening between a performance of Nono's Prometeo and Mahler's Eighth Symphony ushers in a general discussion of modernism. The book is divided into fifteen chapters that fall into three parts, marked “Free,” “New,” and “Again.” In the manner of Lacan's psychoanalytic practice, the chapters are of variable length, and incorporate internal repetition of...
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Spring 2019
Book Review|
April 01 2019
Review: From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, by Seth Brodsky
From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious
, by Seth Brodsky. Oakland
: University of California Press
, 2017
. xvi, 344
pp.
Amy Bauer
Amy Bauer
AMY BAUER is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include studies of twentieth-century composers, modernist opera, and the philosophy and reception of modernist music. Her monographs include Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, 2011) and the coedited collections György Ligeti's Cultural Identities (Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Spectral and Post-spectral Music (forthcoming).
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Journal of the American Musicological Society (2019) 72 (1): 260–266.
Citation
Amy Bauer; Review: From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious, by Seth Brodsky. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2019; 72 (1): 260–266. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.1.260
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