Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis

Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis

Author: Michael D. Searby

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0810872501

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The Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) was one of the most innovative and influential composers of the last 50 years. Ligeti reached his creative maturity in the 1970s and 1980s. This book focuses on how Ligeti's compositional style completely transformed during and after the composition of his only opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-77).


György Ligeti's Cultural Identities

György Ligeti's Cultural Identities

Author: Amy Bauer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-02

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1317105109

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Since György Ligeti’s death in 2006, there has been a growing acknowledgement of how central he was to the late twentieth-century cultural landscape. This collection is the first book devoted to exploring the composer’s life and music within the context of his East European roots, revealing his dual identities as both Hungarian national and cosmopolitan modernist. Contributors explore the artistic and socio-cultural contexts of Ligeti’s early works, including composition and music theory, the influence of East European folk music, notions of home and identity, his ambivalent attitude to his Hungarian past and his references to his homeland in his later music. Many of the valuable insights offered profit from new research undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, while also drawing on the knowledge of long-time associates such as the composer’s assistant, Louise Duchesneau. The contributions as a whole reveal Ligeti’s thoroughly cosmopolitan milieu and values, and illuminate why his music continues to inspire new generations of performers, composers and listeners.


"Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute "

Author: Amy Bauer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 1351560190

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When the Hungarian composer Gy?rgy Ligeti passed away in June 2006, he was widely feted as being one of the greatest composers of our time. His complete published works were recorded during his lifetime and his music continues to inspire a steady stream of performances and scholarship. Ligeti's Laments provides a critical analysis of the composer's works, considering both the compositions themselves and the larger cultural implications of their reception. Bauer both synthesizes and challenges the prevailing narratives surrounding the composer's long career and uses the theme of lament to inform a discussion of specific musical topics, including descending melodic motives, passacaglia and the influence of folk music. But Ligeti 'laments' in a larger sense; his music fuses rigour and sensuality, tradition and the new and influences from disparate high and low cultures, with a certain critical and ironic distance, reflected in his spoken commentary as well as in the substance of his music. The notions of nostalgia, exoticism and the absolute are used to relate works of different eras and genres, along with associated concepts of allegory, melancholy, contemporary subjectivity and the voice.


Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile

Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile

Author: Friedemann Sallis

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2012-08-06

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1554582962

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This book examines the impact place and displacement can have on the composition and interpretation of Western art music, using as its primary objects of study the work of István Anhalt (1919–2012), György Kurtág (1926–), and Sándor Veress (1907–92). Although all three composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically different paths. Whereas, Kurtág remained in Budapest for most of his career, Anhalt and Veress left: the former in 1946 and immigrated to Canada and the latter in 1948 and settled in Switzerland. All three composers have had an extraordinary impact in the cultural environments within which their work took place. In the first section, “Place and Displacement,” contributors examine what happens when composers and their music migrate in the culturally complex world of the late twentieth century. The past one hundred years produced record numbers of refugees, and this fact is now beginning to resonate in the study of music. As Anhalt himself forcefully asserts, however, not all composers who emigrate should be understood as exiles. The first chapters of this book explore some of the problems and questions surrounding this issue. Essays in the second section, “Perspectives on Reception, Analysis, and Interpretation,” look at how performing acts of interpretation on music implies bringing the time, place, and identity of the musician, the analyst, and the teacher to bear on the object of study. Like Kodály, Kurtág considers his work to be “naturally” embedded in Hungarian culture, but he is also a quintessentially European artist. Much of his production—he is one of the twentieth century’s most prolific composers of vocal music—involves the setting of Hungarian texts, but in the late 1970s his cultural horizons expanded to include texts in Russian, German, French, English, and ancient Greek. The book explores how musicologists’ divergent cultural perspectives impinge on the interpretation of this work. The final section, “The Presence of the Past and Memory in Contemporary Music,” examines the impact time and memory can have on notions of place and identity in music. All living art taps into the personal and collective past in one way or another. The final four chapters look at various aspects of this relationship.


Headaches Among the Overtones

Headaches Among the Overtones

Author: Catherine Laws

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2013-12-10

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9401210276

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Samuel Beckett produced some of the most powerful writing – some of the funniest but most devastating – of the twentieth century. He described his plays, prose and poetry as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’, but the extraordinary combination of concision and richness in his writing stems from his peculiar sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of words. Moreover, music forms a part of Beckett’s comic aesthetics of failure: it plays a role in his exploration of the possibilities and failures of the imagination, and the ever-failing attempt to forge a sense of self. No wonder, then, that so many composers have taken inspiration from Beckett, setting his words to music or translating into music the dramatic themes or contexts of his work. Headaches Among the Overtones considers both music in Beckett and Beckett’s significance in contemporary music. In doing so, it explores the relationship between words, music and meaning, examining how comparable philosophical concerns and artistic effects appear in literature and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture

The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture

Author: Janet Sturman

Publisher: SAGE Publications

Published: 2019-02-26

Total Pages: 5212

ISBN-13: 1506353371

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The SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture presents key concepts in the study of music in its cultural context and provides an introduction to the discipline of ethnomusicology, its methods, concerns, and its contributions to knowledge and understanding of the world′s musical cultures, styles, and practices. The diverse voices of contributors to this encyclopedia confirm ethnomusicology′s fundamental ethos of inclusion and respect for diversity. Combined, the multiplicity of topics and approaches are presented in an easy-to-search A-Z format and offer a fresh perspective on the field and the subject of music in culture. Key features include: Approximately 730 signed articles, authored by prominent scholars, are arranged A-to-Z and published in a choice of print or electronic editions Pedagogical elements include Further Readings and Cross References to conclude each article and a Reader’s Guide in the front matter organizing entries by broad topical or thematic areas Back matter includes an annotated Resource Guide to further research (journals, books, and associations), an appendix listing notable archives, libraries, and museums, and a detailed Index The Index, Reader’s Guide themes, and Cross References combine for thorough search-and-browse capabilities in the electronic edition


Form and Process in Music, 1300-2014

Form and Process in Music, 1300-2014

Author: Jack Boss

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-02-08

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1443888478

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Form and Process in Music, 1300–2014: An Analytic Sampler draws together papers delivered at the 2014 meeting of the West Coast Conference of Music Theory and Analysis. The conference spanned an unusually wide spectrum of musical styles, including papers on European twelve-tone music after the Second World War, fourteenth-century music, pop music and jazz, the music of living composers, narrative and characterization, and the history of music theory. The title of the book reflects the large span of musical cultures that are represented within, but also accounts for the common thread through all of these essays, a strong emphasis on understanding the forms and processes of music through analysis. The reader will find within it a compendium of analytic techniques for numerous musical styles.


Electronic Inspirations

Electronic Inspirations

Author: Jennifer Iverson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-28

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190868228

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For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.


Music as Cultural Heritage and Novelty

Music as Cultural Heritage and Novelty

Author: Oana Andreica

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 303111146X

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This book provides a multifaceted view on the relation between the old and the new in music, between tradition and innovation. This is a much-debated issue, generating various ideas and theories, which rarely come to unanimous conclusions. Therefore, the book offers diverse perspectives on topics such as national identities, narrative strategies, the question of musical performance and musical meaning. Alongside themes of general interest, such as classical repertoire, the music of well-established composers and musical topics, the chapters of the book also touch on specific, but equally interesting subjects, like Brazilian traditions, Serbian and Romanian composers and the lullaby. While the book is mostly addressed to researchers, it can also be recommended to students in musicology, ethnomusicology, musical performance, and musical semiotics.