Gyorgy Ligeti Book

One of the world's best known living composers, György Sándor Ligeti is widely acknowledged as the most influential and admired creative figure of the late twentieth century. His brilliantly conceived and challenging pieces, searingly intense at times and full of humor and irony at others, include the orchestral ?Apparitions? and ?Atmosphères,? piano études, the opera ?Le Grand Macabre,? and the unaccompanied choral work ?Lux aeterna,? which Stanley Kubrick actually pirated for the film soundtrack of ?2001: A Space Odyssey.? In this book, Richard Steinitz fuses biographical, stylistic, and technical analysis to examine thoroughly the evolution of Ligeti's innovative music. Drawing extensively on his own private conversations with the composer as well as on many published and recorded interviews, Steinitz places Ligeti's extraordinary body of work within the context of his complex personal life. Born in 1923 to Hungarian Jewish parents in Transylvania, Romania, Ligeti was profoundly affected by the experiences of his formative years under the shadows of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. During the Nazi occupation in World War II, he was sent into forced labor as a Jew, and his father and brother were killed in the concentration camps. Under Communist rule, his work was limited by political repression and censorship, which restricted access to new musical forms and discouraged public presentation of experimental music. After a dramatic escape to Austria in 1956, Ligeti was introduced to the Darmstadt-Cologne avant-garde. Alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gottfried Michael Koenig, and Herbert Elmert at the first electronic music studio, he was free to develop a pioneering and imaginative musical style that consolidated ideas springing from inspirations as varied as the visual arts, literature, theatre, African polyphony, chaos theory, and mathematics. Steinitz's multi-dimensional portrait of Ligeti reveals a boldly independent man of uncompromising standards, endowed with a penetrating mind and personal warmth. Richly illustrated with numerous music examples, this distinctive biography illuminates both the man and his music. It will appeal to admirers of György Ligeti and musicologists alike.Read More