Brodsky is never less than virtuosic in conveying maximum authority on a huge range of complex and often difficult-to-access material. While creating no expectations of gazetteer-like comprehensiveness, Brodsky links detailed technical accounts of compositional contexts to his wider topics concerning modernism and the unconscious.
Arnold Whittall Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle What Brodsky ultimately seeks to find ... Read morein the tangled web of allusion and citation he pulls together here is not so much freedom as a kind of scalpel to cut cords that bind the modern project to the very notion of a future
of the new
and thereby condemn it to repeat the past. lt's a project he acknowledges as more or less impossible, but perhaps no less worthy for all that.
Robert Barry The Wire [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.
(01/01/2018) 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 With refreshing, indeed swashbuckling ambition, From 1989 seeks out the meaning of musical modernism. . . . From the rubble of Schoenberg and Mahler, mortared using the wreckage of Lacan and Adorno, Brodsky constructs a fantastical theoretical cathedral
a 'monument of its own magnificence' (to use Years's phrase) rather than a building for uncritical worship.
Gramophone Brodsky's brilliant and engaging book...opens the way for a rethinking of musical modernism.... It is a virtue of From 1989 that the questions it raises provoke still more.
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