Centre and Periphery Roots and Exile: Interpreting the Music of Istvan Anhalt and Gyorgy Kurtag, and Sandor Veress

by Sallis, Friedemann

• ISBN13: 9781554581481
• ISBN10: 1554581486
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-08-30
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr

Summary

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 Istvfn Anhalt (1919–) and Gy_rgy Kurtfg (1926–). Although both composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically different paths. Kurtfg remained in Budapest for most of his career, whereas Anhalt left in 1946 and immigrated to Canada, where he became one of the country's leading composers.In the first section, "Place and Displacement," the 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. However, as Anhalt himself forcefully asserts, not all composers who emigrate should be understood as exiles. The book explores some of the problems and questions surrounding this issue.Essays in the second section, "Cultural Perspectives 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 Kodfly, Kurtfg considers his work to be "naturally" embedded in Hungarian culture (both recent and remote). But he is also a quintessentially European artist. Much of his production—he is one of the twentieth centurys 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 books explores how musicologists' divergent cultural perspectives impinge on the interpretation of this work.

Author Biography

Friedemann Sallis obtained his PhD in musicology under the direction of the late Carl Dahlhaus at the Technische Universitt Berlin. His writings include a book on the early works of Gyorgy ligeti and numerous articles. He is the co-editor of A Handbook to Twentieth-Century Musical Sketches (2004). Robin Ellitt taught at University College Dublin for six years before assuming the Jean A. Chalmers Chair in Canadian Music at the University of Toronto in 2002. He has edited several books, including two with Gordon E. Smith: Istvn Anhalt: Pathways andMemory (2001) and Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts (wlu Press, 2010). Kenneth Delong is a professor of music history at the University of Calgary, Alberta. He has published extensively on Romantic Czech music. He is also a music critic for the Calgary Herald and Opera Canada.

Table of Contents

List of Examples	p. ix
List of Plates and Figures	p. xiv
List of Tables	p. xvii
Acknowledgements	p. xviii
Introduction	p. 1
First Word
István Anhalt: A Character Sketch	p. 29
Kurtág, as I Know Him	p. 37
"A Kind of Musical Autobiography": Reading Traces in Sandor Veress's Orbis tonorum	p. 45
Place and Displacement
Of die Centre, Periphery; Exile, Liberation; Home and the Self	p. 57
István Anhalt's Kingston Triptych	p. 73
István Anhalt's The Tents of Abraham: Where Music Cannot Heal, Let It Be Restored	p. 89
Which Displacement? Tracing Exile in the Postwar Compositions of István Anhalt and Matyas Seiber	p. 111
Letters to America	p. 129
Roots and Routes: Travel and Translation in Istvfin Anhalt's Operas	p. 175
Le fonds István Anhalt (mus 164) a Bibliotheque et Archives Canada : auto-construction du compositeur et role du lieu dans son ceuvre	p. 199
Perspectives on Reception, Analysis, and Interpretation
Sewing Earth to Sky: István Anhalt and the Pedagogy of Transformation	p. 219
Gyorgy Kurtag'sjdtekok: A "Voyage" into the Child's Musical Mind	p. 241
Arracher la figure au figuratif: la musique vocale de Gyorgy Kurtag	p. 265
Dirges and Ditties: Gyorgy Kurtag's Latest Settings of Poetry by Anna Akhmatova	p. 279
Interpreting Gyorgy Kurtag and George Crumb: Through the Looking Glass	p. 303
The presence of the Past and Memory in Contemporary Music
Gyorgy Kurtag et Walter Benjamin : considerations sur l'aura dans la musique	p. 327
What Presence of the Past? Artistic Autobiography in Gyorgy Kurtag's Music	p. 345
"Listening to inner voices": István Anhalt's Sonance 'Resonance (Welche Tone?)	p. 371
Music Written from Memory in the Late Work of István Anhalt	p. 395
Final Word
On Doubleness and Life in Canada: An Interview with István Anhalt	p. 423
The Contributors	p. 433
Index	p. 439
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