Seth Brodsky

My scholarly and critical work pursues several lines of inquiry, generally clustered around “unconscious” problems—ideology, fantasy, influence and reception, libidinal economy, etc.—and the peculiar role music and sound play in their operations. Past work has centered on modernism and western classical music, exploring how musical modernism’s endeavors in ending and beginning engender structural cycles of repetition and inversion: traversals of (old) fantasies transform (repeatedly) into (new) fantasies of traversal. In my book  From 1989  (short précis here) I explore how musical modernism is what psychoanalysis sounds like when it wanders into the concert hall—or, more pointedly, how psychoanalysis is what musical modernism sounds like when it enters the disenchanting space of the clinic. Related work on  Benjamin Britten,  John Cage,  Wolfgang Rihm, and Arnold Schoenberg expands on these questions of tradition and what Freud called “family romance.” How does music interweave love and hate, and how are musical forms of inheritance especially effective at encoding ambivalence, the contradictory desire to fuse and to separate? 

My current work is moving along two distinct paths. One is a book project on music and (death) drive, which asks how music and sound illuminate contemporary forms of (self-)destructive repetition, from the immediate dopamine hit of the doomscroll to the unshakeable nightmare of history—the rise of new fascisms, climate catastrophe, the specter of extinction. How does music mediate individual and collective self-sabotage? And how might sound serve a generally ambidextrous function in a death-driven culture, as both binding eros and the thrall of Thanatos, a fulcrum for the social contradiction of living in end times, disaster capitalism’s ideal medium and recalcitrant other? (A short preview here.) A second project, tentatively titled Mahler: A Theory, concerns the life, work, and reception of Gustav Mahler as an unlikely territory for rethinking contemporary relations between music and labor, form and excess, institution and dissolution, patriarchy and polymorphous perversity. What might the untimeliness of this “thrice homeless” artist—now the epicenter of both orchestral music and neurotic western subjectivity in all their anachronism—have to say to a present closer to Mahler’s fin-de-siècle than at any point since his death? 

Since 2019, I have also served as director of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. The Center seeks to intervene in existing structures that keep scholarship and the arts separate from each other, and to help reimagine new relationships between them. During this time, I have also served as editor-in-chief of our biannual journal/magazine Portable Gray, and have started the experimental music-sound-performance initiatives Gray Sound and Gray Sound Sessions.