Description
Book SynopsisThis monograph is an authoritative study of the œuvre of one of the most important composers of our time. For the first time, Ligeti’s key works are presented in the context of their drafts and sketches. His personal and artistic development is set forth and illuminated, and his principal compositions are analyzed and reinterpreted, based on detailed studies of the scores and drafts, as well as on personal conversations with the composer. In addition, numerous questions concerning today’s composing are raised and discussed. Music does not have to be puristic: Ligeti’s spheres of interest are close to universal, embracing history, natural science, and visual arts, as well as music of diverse eras and ethnicities. This expanded world of the musical comprises not just tones and sounds, speech and music, the vocal and the instrumental: Ligeti conceives music as a cosmos of acoustic form.
Trade Review«This study excels all previous monographs on the subject of Ligeti in factual thoroughness and breadth of aesthetic horizon, in fineness of intellectual portraiture and authority of musical analysis.» (Lutz Lesle)
«The most exciting, comprehensible, analytically profound and conceptually lucid study to date, which, in addition, for the first time incorporates the sketches in the discussion and thereby elucidates the basic ideas underlying many of the works.» (
Fonoforum)
Table of ContentsContents: Biographical Sketch – Questions of Identity – Towards an Intellectual Physiognomy – A «non-Puristic» Music – Metaphors, Allusions and Synästhesias – Time and Space – New Sound Images – Popularity – Going beyond Serialism –
Apparitions – Atmospheres – Requiem – Lux aeterna – Continuum – Le Grand Macabre – The Turning-point 1980 – Epater l’Avant-garde – The Piano Etudes – The Concerti for Piano, Violin and Horn – Afterword.
