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Distinguished Lecture Series: Seth Brodsky

Thursday, May 23rd, 2019 5:00 pm

Conrad Prebys Music Center Room 367

Free


Interregnum Music

This is a talk about messes—old messes, of the kind that aesthetic modernism was concerned with both making and cleaning up, and new messes, like the one many of us find ourselves in right now politically, culturally, socially, technologically. On the one hand, it might seem a misplaced urge to talk about the historical category of modernism in relation to the current day: the superego injunction to discuss “more urgent things” lifts us up but also beats us down now, not least academics interested in aesthetic theory, and it finds in modernism’s monadic hauteur and pretentious loneliness an easy target for de-prioritization (Think collectively! Work together! Be transparent! Not top-of-list qualities of the stereotypical modernist.) But something of the present pings sympathetically with elements constitutive of aesthetic modernist theory and practice. This is especially true when thinking about music, where modernism’s historical coordinates are fuzzier and extend further into the present.

I build my speculations here around a motley series of encounters all concerned with form and formalism: the myth of Apollo and Marsyas, an interview with Samuel Beckett, the reign of Trump, the work of Caroline Levine, and the Freudian-Lacanian theory of drive; strung throughout are para-encounters with a string quartet of Helmut Lachenmann. But my question is essentially a historical one: as so many categories of experience defining of historical modernism—categories long thought to have been left behind—reemerge as impending conditions, what should we do with this uncanniness, these “formal correspondences” between old and new, this hopeful and tragic sense of repetition? As the revolutionary horizon begins (for better and worse) to reappear, as technology once again regains its utopian and dystopian charisma, and as hegemonic social classes seem poised for dissolution or at least radical realignment—in such a moment, what does modernism still have to tell us? And what does its sound have yet to augur?

Please click on the image on the left for Seth Brodsky's biography.


 


Additional Description:

Seth Brodsky is Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (California 2017, Lewis Lockwood Award 2018). His scholarly and critical work pursues a number of related lines of inquiry focusing on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the cultural place of “the composer”; the role of unconscious processes, particularly as figured in psychoanalytic discourse, in the making and experiencing of music; and repetition, in particular, thinking about aesthetic modernism less as a proverbial "search for the new" then as a larger project in resisting or "breaking" repetition, whether it be the repetition of forms, laws, and languages, of genres and styles, or of themes, patterns, motives, etc. He currently serves as interim director of the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, which seeks to cultivate experimental collaborations between artists and scholars from any and all backgrounds and fields, and is executive editor of its triannual journal Portable Gray.

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