Seth Brodsky's From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious was published in the same year (and by the same publisher) as Tim Rutherford Johnson's Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989. In recognition of this fact, the two authors appeared together on a panel, ‘New Music Histories: The Musical Present in Scholarly and Critical Discourse’, at the Tenth International Conference on Music since 1900 held at Surrey University, UK in September 2017. Although the session was cordial, there was little convergence between the two authors on the cultural meaning of 1989, which is not surprising because the two books have different orientations: Rutherford Johnson's volume is a roadmap of music from after 1989, deriving its theoretical orientation from Nicolas Bourriaud's concept of the ‘altermodern’ (a fusion of post-colonialist and modernist theories), whereas Brodsky's monograph is, among other things, a reflection on music originating from around that time, taking its bearings from Žižek-style Lacanian psychoanalysis. Furthermore, although loss is a theme in both books, for Rutherford Johnson it is one that is mainly about decay as a musical characteristic, while for Brodsky it is a defining condition of modernism – a topic to which I'll return.

After 1989 combines a most impressive range of knowledge and reading with a voice of its own. The book is at its best in describing, using YouTube footage, the cultural events associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in then hearing them through modernist music from the same era. The first of these experiences is David Hasselhoff's performance of his ‘Looking for Freedom’ in December 1989; a song that had been recently in the German charts, in accordance with ‘the Hoff's’ rather puzzling appeal as a pop star in that country. The second calling point is Mstislav Rostropovich's performance of unaccompanied Bach at Checkpoint Charlie in November 1989, an occasion that was recorded by a film crew, despite its apparent spontaneity. Finally, the third stop is Leonard Bernstein's rendition of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in East Berlin in December 1989.

After depicting these events and linking them all to the idea of freedom, Brodsky comments: ‘Bernstein, Hasselhoff, and Rostropovich each appear to disengage from the parade and enjoy, as Jacqueline Rose puts it, a ‘world of pleasure without obligation to what is either permissible or possible, outside the realm of fantasy, to do’ (43). Later, he writes of their ‘need to produce and coordinate what an empty “freedom” cannot contain and what a music saturated with signifiers can only index or trigger: the enjoyment of the people as an excess fleshy vibrancy’ (93–4). This is a stimulating interpretation in which the author demonstrates that he can adopt Žižek's culture-mulching language to his own purposes. Nevertheless, it is not clear why such fleshiness is specific to the occasion, as opposed to performances by the same people of the same music in other locations, and the author misses the opportunity to consider his own perspective as an American writing about Europe.

Brodsky's next move, the most interesting one in the book, is to offer modernism as the antidote to this fantasy space. As he puts it: ‘while the stunts of Bernstein, Rostropovich and Hasselhoff needed such fantasies to work, using the master signifier “freedom” to veil and wall up a radical historical breach, the latter [modernism] needed such fantasies to fail, to fall apart, to unveil a historical Real’ (19). The music he chooses for this function, all of which dates from around 1989, is Luciano Berio's Schubertian Rendering, Paweł Szymański's A Kaleidoscope for M.C.E., for solo cello, and Heiner Goebbels's (described as an experimental rock musician) Befreiung (Liberation). Adding to an already heavy theoretical apparatus, the author then harnesses Michael Foucault's concept of ‘heterotopia’ (a space that undermines utopian fantasies) to the Lacanian unconscious to provide a mechanism for these works to be modernist undoings of the freedom fantasy.

Brodsky links Rendering to Beethoven's Ninth, on the basis that it says what Bernstein cannot say: ‘that no loving father dwells above the starry canopy, that no narrator remains to tell us which tones’ (161). He attaches Szymański's piece to Rostropovich's Bach, and then concludes, most incisively in an endnote, that: ‘One kind of servant – Rostropovich's music-priest – is switched out for a very different kind: the twittering machine’ (305). Finally, he connects Befreiung to ‘the Hoff’. Befreiung, as related by Brodsky, is for speaker and an ensemble that is part new music, part rock band; and although Goebbels's work dates from before the fall of the wall, the composer does some of Brodsky's work for him by talking about the meaning of its title. The author states: ‘Befreiung was, if Goebbels is to be believed, a direct reaction to the “hackneyed revolutionary vocabulary” being appropriated by “every furniture company”, and it is this confabulation of agitprop and consumerism that finds its apotheosis in Hasselhoff's extended fist as he belts out a song about looking for a freedom based on becoming a “self-made man” who rejects his father's fortune’ (146). Brodsky's reading, or hearing, of the official events of 1989 through unofficial ones is creative and appealing. Nevertheless, it is also slightly stretched, because there is no compelling reason why the modernist music chosen for heterotopian purposes needs to derive from 1989. For example, Lachenmann's Staub from 1984, which Brodsky mentions, would have been an obvious work to consider in relation to Bernstein's performance since it tackles the Ninth Symphony head on.

Anyway, having chosen his three modernist works, Brodsky then spins them out into Bach, Schubert and liberation networks, offering as he goes valuable comments on individual works. The author's extensive online searches of composerly music from this era reveal just how much historical reflection was happening in Europe at that time. At this point in the argument, however, Brodsky queries the heterotopian, critical potential of modernism by quoting the more pessimistic tone of Jürgen Habermas's essay of 1985 ‘The New Obscurity’, asking: ‘What are all these out-of-grasp Schuberts and mortified Bachs if not expressions of a new condition in which “it seems as if the utopian energies have been used up, as if they had withdrawn themselves from historical reflection”?’ (171). The conflict between this apparent retraction and a more critical intent is not one that the book resolves, but then it is not one to which an obvious answer presents itself.

Despite the inherent interest of the networks Brodsky identifies, the emphasis on 1989 is again a little synthetic, because this kind of historical reflection (and contra Habermas, there is some reflection) had been happening since Berio's Sinfonia of 1969, as Brodsky partly acknowledges. Sinfonia is, of course, famous for its overlay of the scherzo from Mahler's Second Symphony, so it is no surprise that Brodsky also finds a Mahler network, later in the volume, in addition to a rather looser Bergian Lyric Suite network. The big omission, though, is a Schumann network, because Schumann has been important for the whole historical inclusion tendency, while the preoccupation with madness found in his network would have been a worthwhile one to have considered through the lens of psychoanalysis.

After 1989's wide-ranging vision additionally considers the possibility that Beethoven's late style might be a precursor to modernism, but concludes instead ‘that something like modernism can be seen to begin with the reception of Beethoven's late works, which is to say, with their ‘delayed activation’ or ‘deferred action’ (61), a process that partly took place through the agency of Adorno's Spätstil essay of 1937 and, it is suggested, is also implicit in the Lyric Suite of 1926. That this deferred action took place early in the twentieth century is a perspective that is in keeping with Brodsky's framework for modernism in music, which is mainly early and late, with little in the middle. Early is found in his psychoanalytic reading of Schoenberg's Erwartung which, though an obvious choice, deploys Lacan's mathemes with great assurance to reach the conclusion that it is a psychodrama about the loss of tonality. Late modernism, as seen, is to be found in the composer networks discussed previously.

The big hole in the argument is the modernism of the 1950s, possibly because Brodsky associates it with what he calls mid-century Freudian ego psychology, though he doesn't actually say that. The dominant aesthetic of modernism in the 1950s was one that suppressed the semiotic associations of the common practice era, so consideration of something by Boulez or Stockhausen from the mid-century would have provided a valuable balance to the discussions of music from 1989. Tonal signifying characteristics no longer represent such a dominant culture for the later music of composer networks, thus they offer a resource to be used without implying the complete return to tonality that was feared in the mid century. Brodsky does nonetheless touch on this area: ‘The multiplicities of modernism are to some degree its most established story, vying for prominence only with an older, more threadbare tale of modernism's commitment to abstraction, to formalism, to autonomy’ (126). Still, his argument would carry more weight if it were illustrated with some examples of what he means by the threadbare tale of abstraction.

For Brodsky, the multiplicities of modernism are manifestation of its underlying relationship to modernity, a prevailing theme in his book. A little later he writes: ‘I would argue that the radical variability of modernism's appearances is a necessary precipitate of its fantasmatic relationship to something radically non-appearing: the break to which it proclaims fidelity’ (126). A page later he continues: ‘Modernism could also be conceived as an unconscious commitment to modernity, whose impossible character, now repressed, is thus secretly enjoyed’ (127). Much later, he offers a broader position, stating that ‘modernism can be understood in the most general sense as a response to modernity, a testing of its modes of representation’ (217).

Although these formulations have substance, they are pitched at such a high level that they are quite difficult to use for practical purposes. A more prosaic understanding would be that maybe the break with representation, or tonality, was not a complete split but one that allowed continuities as well as ruptures, partly because that symbolic order was never as integrated as it claimed to be. Furthermore, this is an insight that can be reached by other methods, such as deconstruction, as well as by cultural psychoanalysis. Another point is that although the reflections of the art theorist T. J. Clark are important for Brodsky's thinking, their influence tends to assume that the parallels between modes of visual representation and the established order of tonality are stronger than might be expected.

Alongside the previously discussed events from 1989, Brodsky notes that it was also the year in which Slavoj Žižek's first English-language publication appeared: The Sublime Object of Ideology. Whatever the fragility of the 1989 parallel, Žižek's take on Lacan is certainly important for Brodsky's understanding of modernism, and chapter 4's explanation of this area is as clear as one could hope for. Nevertheless, the idea that a problem can be reduced to the underlying structures of Lacan's mathemes is a little, well, structuralist, even though Brodsky's dexterity with the symbols and his ability to use them for his own purposes is virtuosic. Furthermore, the present-day tendency for Žižek the public figure to offer a running commentary on current affairs can make his ideas feel a little worn, notwithstanding the brilliance of his early publications

The book concludes by returning to the whole problem of modernism's self-critique. ‘Getting rid of the tawdriness, finding a way to fail better than the now corporate phrase “fail better”, is modernism's unending labour. But there is no getting rid of the afterlife. It is unavoidable. Modernism, as a tradition of remembering oblivion, a ceaseless re-reception of what was never there in the first place, is still living it. I do not see – or hear – an end’ (268). This bleak conclusion, which does not envisage any other kind of music as offering a solution, is predicated on the idea that modernism was founded on oblivion. However, if it derived from something less drastic than oblivion, then modernism looks, and sounds, like a less pointless endeavour. In an endnote, Brodsky quotes Clark writing, in language that Brodsky considers more historical than psychoanalytic, about ‘the paradox involved in making bourgeois art in the absence of a bourgeoisie’ (322). This is not a paradox that offers an easy solution, but it is at least one we can live with and which might take us beyond a state of paralysis. After all, modernism must have something going for it if people can be bothered to talk about it. Indeed, there is more to this book than can be absorbed on one reading, so it is one to which I'll certainly return.