Author:
Amy Bauer University of California, 3043 Contemporary Arts Center, CA-92697-2775 Irvine, United States

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Abstract

Conservative critic John Borstlap cited Ligeti as a partisan in his fight against the modernist myth of progress in the arts, based on the famous citation “I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Ligeti's ambivalence reflected his distaste for art linked to utopian socialist ideals, and for all that was reactionary. Yet he admitted that his own youthful utopian strivings evolved into a desire for complex music that often defied audibility. This essay traces Ligeti's reception history from the late 1950s onward as a reaction to the thwarted utopian strains in his music. For some, Ligeti's music of the 1960s seemed to define “the contemporary problem itself.” But the composer's increased visibility in the 1990s led to demands that he deal with his Jewish heritage and wartime trauma, and cease writing music with a broad appeal. I argue that Ligeti's works reinscribe the past, the personal, and the extramusical as a conscious expression of his prison. They express the nonlinear notion of progress that defines modernism: a vast “tear in the historical process” able to lift music above the scrum of political-aesthetic skirmishes, to a “region which lies elsewhere.”

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Senior editors

Editor(s)-in-Chief: Péter BOZÓ (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

Review Editor: Lynn HOOKER (Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA)

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Patrick DEVINE (Maynooth University, Maynooth, IRL)
Anna LASKAI (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

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  • Anja BUNZEL (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences, CZ)
  • William A. EVERETT (Conservatory University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA)
  • Márta GRABÓCZ (University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, F)
  • Denis HERLIN (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, F)
  • Vjera KATALINIĆ (HR)
  • Katalin KOMLÓS (professor emerita, Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, H)
  • Valeria LUCENTINI (University of Bern, CH)
  • Tatjana MARKOVIĆ (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, A)
  • Pál RICHTER (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)
  • László SOMFAI (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)
  • László VIKÁRIUS (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

 

Editorial Secretary

  • István Csaba NÉMETH (Institute for Musicology, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, H)

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Studia Musicologica
Language English
French
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2007 (1961)
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Founder Magyar Tudományos Akadémia
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ISSN 1788-6244 (Print)
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