Seth Brodsky (@sbrodsky.bsky.social)
@spbrodsky
Followers
1,964
Following
1,719
Media
804
Statuses
13,154
I teach music at University of Chicago, direct the Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, and am mostly unconscious. Stuff:
Chicago, IL
Joined July 2017
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
namjoon
• 329630 Tweets
Linkin Park
• 149707 Tweets
Adalet
• 120089 Tweets
For Asia
• 101222 Tweets
Chester
• 77529 Tweets
علي النبي
• 73352 Tweets
BTS PAVED THE WAY
• 67997 Tweets
Hayırlı Cumalar
• 46808 Tweets
Engin Polat
• 46126 Tweets
サブスク解禁
• 44824 Tweets
#BAEKHYUN_PINEAPPLESLICE
• 38235 Tweets
エイリアン
• 31169 Tweets
#يوم_الجمعه
• 29095 Tweets
資さんうどん
• 26808 Tweets
知的レベル
• 25435 Tweets
すかいらーく
• 24195 Tweets
アストロボット
• 20031 Tweets
ちいかわ寿司
• 19926 Tweets
ベイマックス
• 14946 Tweets
大阪府警
• 12985 Tweets
MEW LOVE IN THE AIR
• 12234 Tweets
フリーランスの田中
• 10962 Tweets
TILFF X UPPOOM
• 10927 Tweets
ロムルス
• 10418 Tweets
神ちゃん
• 10044 Tweets
All my love to the French lefties and above all to this beautiful French mustachioed man
106
3K
76K
Truly and absolutely sincerely, this man has clearly worked hard for this moment
6
36
2K
The "game over, Trump's already won" discourse is repulsive. T's power stems from tautology, an alpha I am-who-I-am performance that always seals the deal of itself & confiscates any actual ie open future. Many ways to express despair & fear that don't preemptively rehearse this.
6
66
338
I can’t believe Richard Taruskin wrote a six-fucking-volume history of western fucking music and didn’t mention Prince fucking once
I can't believe Prince made an album called "Musicology" and didn't mention Richard Taruskin once
11
38
490
5
19
308
Aspire to the conceptual elegance of the TOC of Darian Leader's recent book Jouissance, which is on the concept of Jouissance
5
10
232
🧵One thing I love about psychoanalysis is that it is still a very public conversation that wastes no time arriving at the dire—life & death, sex & love, the very capacity to make a future—in intelligent deeply creative ways. Some of my favorite public provocations of late:
1
14
204
They did it. Astonishment and, more, deep admiration for the colleagues who spent years working against every resistance to make this happen. It will change this place.
4
8
167
The Music Dept
@UChicago
is hiring! A lot! Two positions (at the moment): assistant prof in musicology, associate/full in composition. Please come work with us. Help us reimagine what it means to make, teach, exist in/with music in these times! Links below:
5
60
134
Apropos really truly nothing I am still agog at the formal symmetry of this
4
10
125
Can't eat the amount this makes me want to vomit
6
11
110
This magazine has at every imaginable fork in the road taken the path that goes harder and more fiercely toward the present wound, holding a light on it, it's been breathtaking to watch
5
13
106
IDF actually declaring itself a terrorist organization
1
41
101
It does sometimes seem the main power of twitter specifically is to provide an artisanal way to express despair at the worlds course
3
17
103
Follow the $$: why does nobody talk about money in Tár? Maybe for the same reason they resist the movie in systematic & structural terms. Fixation on judging character & maker & “feeling personally attacked” both deflect what the film lays fairly bare.🧵. .
1
8
96
Music theory—well, anglophone western music theory—is in such a strange place right now. Major names coming out & saying the whole field needs a rethink. And rethinking in v weird inventive problematic ways! Below is from Chua/Rehding's wonderfully bonkers *Alien Listening*:
10
5
95
Biggest strike in US Higher Ed history begins today
Monday morning at 8 am, 48,000 UC academic workers hit the picket lines in the largest higher education strike in US history. The strike has been a long time in the making and has had many authors.
A 🧵 on austerity budgets ...
33
2K
11K
0
23
89
Re: Schoenberg not worth it & yet how else to put it? Not liking, fine, can’t all be musical pervs. But not liking bc he ruined music? Bc a weird Jewish guy came along & w/ his decadent formalism sullied (the purity of) the classical tradition? Bad trope pls historicize.
8
6
89
Favorite writing on psychoanalysis and love?
21
13
89
honestly of all the things this might be what does it for me
Elon Musk announces that extending Twitter’s character limit from 280 to 1,000 is on his ‘to-do list.’
714
496
9K
11
4
85
I did not order this please send it back
4
3
79
Taruskin the number of Taruskin times I Taruskin have received kindred Taruskin warnings this Taruskin morning that Taruskin Taruskin has a google alert that Taruskin notifies him when he is mentioned on the Taruskin internet and that I Taruskin should expect an email from Tarusk
4
6
77
If you think Tchaikovsky is masturbation music wait till I tell you about music theorists studying Milton Babbitt at the Eastman School of Music circa 1998
4
6
71
Finally teaching a year long dissertation proposal seminar. Would love to hear of your favorite texts on writing, academic and otherwise, and any advice you have from teaching such courses yourselves!
17
6
72
I mean, this is, in a veiled way, what it already is
won't be long before we get a beautifully written profile on the erotics of union busting
9
20
271
3
3
73
lol didn’t realize this was Germany. That kid has SALT
American rapper Macklemore at a concert in Mönchengladbach, Germany.
"There will never be reparations for the atrocities of the Holocaust. The only way to atone for our past is to stand up today against apartheid, occupation and genocide - Free Palestine"
41
2K
5K
1
0
71
My students are yet again amazing. Today one defined death drive as
“We want to be in control of what’s killing us” and another coined the phrase “OK OOOmer”
4
1
71
he looks like a care bear exiled from the group for public masturbation
Vance has wartime physiognomy. He looks like every civil war general who got promoted after the first few battles happened and people figured out who was good at war.
998
30
521
5
10
68
Would love to see the absolute partisan resolve and hatred of ambivalence directed at Taruskin’s death work its way into a proper leftist musicology. The opposite of his bullying narcissism is not handwashing but organizing+solidarity.
4
7
67
Psychoanalysis folks: do you recall, beyond the most obv suspects/canonical texts, any really clarifying accounts of how drives *emerge*? Like, concrete stories of genesis, in childhood, at specific stages & ages, as distinctly human (or not) mechanisms? I find these ... elusive!
14
1
66
Ok, so here is the real news: visionary composer-performer-artist-poet-historian Matana Roberts will be Distinguished Guest Composer next year with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition! Welcome them!
2
6
66
I am dead serious: the crisis of music theory is also a great opportunity—to train theorists as public intellectuals & writers helping steer public opinion on the actually vital matter of the fate of music today! & preventing this utter absolute shittt!
2
3
66
Yay,
@lizalimcomposer
's gobsmacking new Annunciation Triptych—45 minutes of non-escapist orchestral utopianism that will elevate your day entirely—is finally out and available here:
3
12
63
So heartened at the incredibly high level of public criticism on psychoanalysis. Two brilliant new book reviews from
@HZeavin
and
@PatBlanchfield
that go completely above&beyond in acts of synthetic generosity that hatch from new thought even newer thought. Links below.
3
7
61
@ztsamudzi
lol that is the ESSENCE of Midwestern generosity which is neither generous nor capable of waiting but indeed a scourge
0
5
60
Being .666 of this wild cocktail I would humbly propose that the philosophy part is ONCE AGAIN the real problem here
5
3
58
Heartbroken at this giant’s passing. Nobody on earth like him. Farewell Wolfgang Rihm (1952-2024)
2
9
61
Dudes tweeting again about Schoenberg destroying the cultural “vitality” (eek) of classical music. Kettle logic about Schoenberg being too influential and not influential enough. He deserves better antagonists!
9
3
60
Hack
I'm teaching writing, so I'm going to parse some of Berlant's sentences for my followers: she got an offer from UC Irvine's English Dept. I went to her talk, but didn't read her work. It would have made me commit seppuku if I had. She seemed smart in person.
9
1
52
9
1
59
Finally going to teach a seminar on new music (aesthetics/politics/ethics). Perverse that I’ve waited this long. What, comrades, should I include? Send me your work!
9
1
59
@marisollebron
A lot of us feel it, obv a bit unspeakable & wavering but it helps to rage against the not-fated element. Really struck by this line from a recent piece: “this “burnout” that secure scholars are feeling is phantom pain where their colleagues should be”.
1
6
59
The more I tire of talking Tár, the more I find my collar tugged by incredibly dumbass takes. They often have one thing in common: they think the film is trying to dupe them or seduce them. But aah they have its number! They won't be duped! What a destitute way to treat fiction.
People are so fucking brain-dead about TÁR. Functionally illiterate reading.
100
99
2K
6
3
56
Current dream: training PhDs to become doctors who train union members in all the historically emergent truths that would otherwise die in library stacks but instead live in collectively wielded power; and having this really be the goal, not just some alternative timeline
4
4
57
Q for Academic Twitter: do you have stories of deans forcing hires on departments?
30
3
54
Is she immortal??
5
5
53
Apparently my kid got ahold of my phone for some customizing and I must admit, they cooked
5
0
52
I have never encountered anyone like Lauren Berlant. Anyone whose thought was as supple and capable of standing up to reality without lying about it, or cutting it short. A legend of the actual. I am so sad to see them go, and so sad for their many many friends.
1
4
53
Hearing reports that the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has died at 70. If true, crushing news. She had so much more music in her.
1
10
51
Modernism & psychoanalysis: 2 things/histories/futures I love, struggle w/, love to struggle w/, but never struggle to love, & am marveling at a golden age of public writing on them. Just gushed about
@Parapraxis_Mag
, more on that soon, but also here are 3 other new gobsmackers:
1
2
49
Congratulations to
@blackflaghag
and
@Zghartawi
on their Palestine Book Award 2022 for Psychoanalysis under Occupation! Such a remarkable rethinking of insides/outsides, clinic/ street, & capacity & need to think futures in a foreclosed present. Read it!
0
13
49
I really liked Tár, as you know!, but there are v good critiques of it. However, sigh, they never seem to come from folks involved in classical music who w/o fail take the film personally & usually levy a moralism that, well, confirms bad stereotypes about classical music.
4
2
47
All I have to add to the music Twitter discourse is that the greatest film about classical music ever made, which you all hate, clearly demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that The Conductor is the real source of agony & once sacrificed will allow restoration of the order.
10
0
47
Bowser was a TERRIBLE PERSON.
He was a TYRANT. He betrayed every ideal he ever claimed to stand for. He was a shameless pathological liar who killed millions of helpless toads for his own insatiable vanity. He is literally one of the worst people in history.
3
4
45
Hey busy everywhere people! If you find yourselves obviously or improbably in Ithaca, NY, this afternoon, drop in to hear me talk about music, & also drive, in that order, & not necessarily in relation. Would love to see you there! MWAH.
5
2
46
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime sure, but this is something else
3
5
45
Grad student appreciation tweet. An intense seminar yesterday, couldn't ever tell how it was going, still can't. But the sincerity & depth of questioning & capacity to sit vulnerable in confusion & unclarity & keep going—there are so few places this can happen & they rose to it.
2
2
44
Portable Gray 9, “Arts of Psychoanalysis,” is now live! A pretty remarkable issue. Get it here:
6
13
47
The Favorite Person, She has Made a Book, and It is Arrived. Here It Is. Please, buy it, smell it, smell with it. It's such a gorgeous thing, and made with such love.
@joodstew
1
8
47
10 years ago today, I finished assembling a crib for a person I didn't know yet
4
0
45
You may not like it but this what peak performance looks like
no matter how many times i read this passage from adorno, every time i audibly gasp
47
633
6K
4
3
45
You: Lacan is scary.
Me: no no really so much of it is deeply intuitive, playful, and weirdly approachable!
It:
3
3
44
One small but central challenge of the present: to continue to celebrate defend & protect weirdos while at the same time being able to distinguish being weird from being other things that are not v cool at all
3
4
45
Sorry to this man who does not know what he is talking about at all & has decided he wants to not-know-what-he-is-talking-about in front of literally everybody & who when this it pointed out to him will reveal he is neither empiricist nor leftish
I don't even need to wonder what the response to this one will be from, you know. But that's not most of us, who will read this as my take, as a leftish empiricist, on the idea that music theory is disrespectful to black people. Um - it isn't!
81
52
415
1
0
43
"Why Theory?" It would be so great to put music theory/music theorists more in conversation with what "theory" more broadly means & does. What are your fave texts? (
@V21collective
always thinking of u). Three that immediately come to mind for me:
9
4
44
People are saying it’s all a bit & sure it is but bits can be craven attempts to leverage a depth one doesn’t possess while also not having the courage to actually be shallow & produce the wonderful indeterminacy a real shallowness can & that’s what this is
5
0
43
Yes! I read painfully slowly it is a greatest source of shame & frustration & yes would prefer all dears here find a way to defend reading w/o sounding like gym rats
2
1
43
20 years later this still curdles my blood like nothing else, a whole cosmos of values just showing itself
5
2
44
This was not *a* performance in Bayreuth in 1876, this was the world premiere of the Ring cycle. Talk about a missed encounter with the real.
This book opens with that anecdote about Marx getting refused entry to a Wagner performance in Bayreuth in 1876 so you know it’ll be good
12
66
1K
0
3
40
ISZ IT NOT RATHER DE CASE THAT FILLING OUT THE BACKGROUND OF THE PICTURE IS EXACTLY WAT DE FANTASY EETSELF ISZ SUPPOSED TO DO
3
2
42
@IChotiner
This is like someone who does not know German, trying to speak German, with English words.
1
1
37
jesus christ this solo, never stop marveling at it, ever ever
Thelonious Monk performing “Blue Monk” with Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, Larry Gales on bass and Ben Riley on drums live at the University Aula in Oslo, Noway, 1966.
356
4K
23K
0
1
41
Re: Schoenberg: the anti-Semitic tropes aside, it’s also a bummer to see the scolds & moralists playing historian when dealing with an artist who also needs literary understanding. He’s not just a historical personage but a tragic figure! A condensation of so many plot paths.
1
1
42
Well there goes my entire second book
5
0
41
@Amelia_Lindsey
On the same my partner wrote a potential client with the subject line “Consluting,” I wrote, after weeks of egregious and shame-filled procrastination, to my “dissertation committme”
1
0
39
Say you have a 9 yr old without yadda yadda
5
2
40
These amazing selfies from 1964 have an amazing conversation behind/in front of them too, where the two debate the use of utopian thinking for the present day.
2
4
41
This is great. Debates about whether to abolish tenure miss the point that all teachers at US unis, every single one, are paradoxically an impediment to the designs of their boards & admin. Tenureds need to convince their like of this, organizing work more & more in reach.
1
4
41
Psychoanalysis Twitter! Your favorite shorter writings/passages on: the unconscious, transference, drive?
8
6
41
I do believe we have chosen Door
#2
, which is—CHICAGO WILL HAVE THE MOST PROGRESSIVE ALIGNMENT OF MAYOR, CITY COUNCIL, COUNTY & STATE GOVERNOR THE CITY HAS EVER KNOWN.
If Vallas manages, we now have a city council in place that’ll give his neoliberal agenda hell. If Brandon pulls this out, we will have the most progressive alignment of mayor, city council, county, and state governor that this city has ever known. We will make big moves.
4
19
136
2
1
39
1 thing that is truly cutting: you can say the whole field kinda sucks—like just directly dismiss it as "boring" and "incomprehensible"—& virtually nobody in that field bats an eye. But the second you produce receipts that it sustains structural racism: CHAOS.
1
0
39
It's not the terminology it's the ignorance and hypocrisy
Ok, folks. Lotsa handwaving on terminology. Sub in "music theory" for "musicology." I know the difference but questions stand. As they also do for the fact - it is one - that evaluation on musicology and music theory are deeply related (say I'm wrong??). Judge my main point, pls?
51
4
81
2
0
40
Happy Hundredth, dear György Ligeti. Your music actually changed my life, emotionally, conceptually, materially. New irreversible metaphors. Here’s a beautiful tour courtesy of composer&writer
@l_dunn1
of a difficult labyrinthine life.
0
8
39
All this handwringing about getting people to come to the symphony when the real campaign was right there all along: come at the symphony.
0
2
39
The sheer art of combining righteousness, consistency, trolling, retort, so many kind of speech here, maddest props
Columbia University’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” has been re-erected, just in time for Alumni Weekend:
329
4K
24K
0
7
39
Child: I’m not being defensive!
Me: [gently raises eyebrow]
Child: don’t Freud me!!
4
2
38
Notre Homme de la Place de Stalingrad de Paris (autre angle)
0
0
38
This was so wonderful. Donald Moss incredibly poetic in his condensation of Freud & the—a?—family problem: the dilemma of being coherent enough to wish for freedom only through having internalized the tyrant, swallowing the father, enjoying the paternal meal. Join the next one!
Join The Psychosocial Foundation (
@PsychosocialFo1
) for a Seminar on “The Problem of the Family.” The facilitated seminars are inclusive groups working on a core problematic of psychosocial thought. Registration is available here, by sliding scale:
2
26
65
1
7
36
1 thing I don’t get about complaints that succession is just really ugly unpleasant people doing awful stuff is: this is just hardcore realism, a v well written & acted version of the actual conditions that rule our lives. The Harvard news today, pure succession
5
2
37
@Komaniecki_R
Yes. I think they're being generated by the composer Johannes Kreidler, and there are more of them!
1
1
37