Brodsky - From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious

This books cover features a wall with a hole in it, which seems about right to me: books are forms of closure and fixity and creaturely confinement, but strange ones, in that they want only to be opened, loosed, caught back up in conversations much like the ones that started them. In this sense, the book is the least representative form of what it stands for. The people I thank here are those without whom this book couldnt have been written, but they are also those whose minds, words, grace, and attention are the book in its better form.

I must first thank those with whom I started these conversations, above all David B. Levy and Scott Klein; each of them turned my wheel a degree or two, and changed my trajectory forever. Jrgen Thym, Martin Scherzinger, and Robert Morris will see little here of what they first helped come into being, but their counsel initiated the process, the questions, and the standard of thought. Justin Caulley, Robert Fink, Jeremy Grimshaw, Rob Haskins, Michael Klinger, Matthew McGaughey, Sara Nicholson, and Robert Wood were also among the projects first stateside interlocutors. Its Berlin wing, often involving site-specific encounters, includes Angela Ida De Benedictis, Pietro Ernesto Cavallotti, Talaya Delaney, Justin Caulley (again!), Bianca Charamsa, Heiko Hoffmann, Heidi Enzian, Thomas Richter, and Ehren Fordyce. Friends and former colleagues Richard Cohn, James Hepokoski, Gundula Kreuzer, Pat McCreless, Ian Quinn, and Michael Veal were invaluable early partners in thought. A 2012 workshop with the JACK Quartetat that time Kevin McFarland, Christopher Otto, John Pickford Richards, and Ari Streisfeldredefined the scope of the project. Questions, lunches, dinners, and more questions from Matthew Arndt, Lee Blasius, Robert Cook, Brian Hyer, and Jennifer Iverson also took things in happy unanticipated directions, as did help and inspiration from Peter Schmelz. Kaitlyn Tucker was extremely gracious in sharing some of her exciting new work on the history of the Ljubljana School of post-Lacanians. I owe a special debt to Ilya Kliger, not only for his intellectual fellowship, but for introducing me to the thought of Jacques Lacan, and also to the peerless work of Bruce Fink. An American Musicological Society panel on music and psychoanalysis provided me some essential collaborators, among them Amy Cimini, Clara Latham, Fred Maus, and Holly Watkins. Deep writing wisdom from Elisabeth Le Guin and Tamara Levitzthe kind that takes a few years to reach the surface, where it then stayscame at the right time. Conversations with Mathias Spahlinger in early 2015 proved invaluable; while his music is not discussed in the pages of this bookhis passage/paysage from 1990 deserves its own bookhis influence and example run throughout as a silent current.

In concrete terms, this book is a fruit of my time so far at the University of Chicago. I cannotand, evidently, could notconceive it coming into being anywhere else than this schools enlivening air and ethos, and the wonderful people who make it breathe. They have provided me an intellectual camaraderie the likes of which Id never known. Gabriel and Jonathan Lear were key supporters early on; David Levin and Eric Santner have remained constant companions of the project, as have Jessica Stockholder and Patrick Chamberlain; and Maud Ellmann and the whole Modernisms Workshop crew were vital interlocutors over an entire year. My colleagues in music, among them Philip Bohlman, Anthony Cheung, Thomas Christensen, Travis Jackson, Robert Kendrick, Marta Ptaszynska, Augusta Read Thomas, and Lawrence Zbikowski, never ceased to buoy and inspire my best efforts. I extend special thanks to the intrepid graduate students in my seminars on postwar European music, music and psychoanalysis, and modernism and repetition. Among other institutions I must thank the Paul Sacher Stiftung and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung; I cannot imagine my work without their early and enormous generosity. At the Sacher, Evelyne Diendorf, Matthias Kassel, Felix Meyer, Ulrich Mosch, Michle Noirjean-Linder, Robert Piencikowski, and Heidy Zimmermann made my repeated stays a welcoming pleasure, never hesitating with expertise and patient guidance. Hermann Danuser was my host during my year as a Humboldt German Chancellor Fellow; a model for my research, he was also an early and invaluable supporter. A grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst introduced me to Berlin; a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship from Yale University supported my extended return.