Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination

by Steinitz, Richard

• ISBN13: 9781555535513
• ISBN10: 1555535518
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-20
• Publisher: INGRAM

Summary

One of the world's best known living composers, Gyoergy Sandor 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 Atmospheres, piano etudes, the opera Le Grand Macabre, and the unaccompanied choral work Lux aeterna, which Stanly 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.

Author Biography

Richard Steinitz is a composer and Professor of Music at the University of Huddersfield. He is the founder and former Artistic Director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. He lives in England.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgements	xiii
Introduction	xv
PART I From East to West
The Making of the Man	3	(34)
Night and Morning: An East European Apprenticeship	37	(35)
Catching Up	72	(24)
The Watershed of 1960: International Debut	96	(21)
PART 2 Fantasy and Technique
Distorting Mirrors: Humour and Antilogic	117	(23)
Distance and Enchantment	140	(27)
A Gestural Kaleidoscope	167	(12)
Spider's Web: The Labyrinth of Melodies	179	(17)
Dis(c)loc(k)ation and Transformation	196	(21)
PART 3 The Grand Illusionist
Alice in Breughelland: A Grotesque Carnival of Sex and Death	217	(27)
In the midst of life . . .	244	(22)
The Dynamics of Disorder	266	(11)
The Piano Etudes	277	(38)
Curiouser and curiouser	315	(26)
On (Not) Writing Opera	341	(24)
Notes	365	(13)
Appendix: Productions of Le Grand Macabre	378	(3)
Glossary	381	(6)
Chronological list of works	387	(6)
Bibliography	393	(12)
Discography	405	(6)
Index	411