"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."—Tempo
"[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 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
“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’s
Erwartung coming into view.”—Anne C. Shreffler, Harvard University
“Brilliantly written and argued,
From 1989 is 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 of
Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice “Habermas famously claimed that Enlightenment modernity was an ‘unfinished project.’
From 1989 goes him one further to claim that modernity, at least as engaged in works of late twentieth-century European music, was an
unbegun project, a fantasy of total transformation that never really got off the ground. For Brodsky—who can effortlessly dissect any piece of New Music you’d care to set down in front of him and who can show you just how each such piece fails to actualize its own structural promises—the real analytical quarry is much larger. He is out to show that it is musical modernism
itself that doesn’t work.”—Robert Fink, author of
Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practic “The advent of musical modernism coincided with the advent of psychoanalysis at the beginning of the twentieth century: Schoenberg shaking hands with Freud. Seth Brodsky’s sweeping book scrutinizes this paradoxical intersection from the vantage point of the momentous year 1989—taking stock of the fate of modernism in all its multiple facets, looking backward and forward, and rounding out the work with a splendid chapter on the inaugural moment of Schoenberg’s
Erwartung. A magnificent intellectual and musical journey of great lucidity and erudition.”—Mladen Dolar, University of Ljubljana