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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