Unknown Britten: Opera, Archeology, Psychoanalysis
Prof. Seth Brodsky
Yale University

Professor Seth Brodsky specializes in music after 1945; theories of modernism and postmodernism; music and critical theory; Adorno; continental philosophy; influence, borrowing, and intertextuality; music, melancholy, and pathologies of mind. Brodsky's work as a scholar, teacher, and critic is guided by the tension between history as documentary practice, history as imagination, and imagination as forgetting; between event, memory, and the new, "that which happened" and its subjective transcription, distortion and effacement. Brodsky is completing a book currently titled Utopian Strain: Ambivalent Absolutes in European Music, 1961-2001 that explores four of postwar Europe's most influential composers (Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm) within the context of Adorno's writing on utopian negativity. Related projects include articles on Rihm and the German metaphysical tradition; an article (in preparation) on Berio, Berg, and Celan; and an examination of postwar European music as an endeavor in alternative memorial, not only to the aesthetic utopias of modernism's past, but also to the last century's genocides and art's complicity therein.