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My Father. (Book Reviews: Composers).(Book Review)-

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My Father. By Peter Bartok. Homosassa, Fla.: Bartok Records, 2002. [iv, 331 p. ISBN 0-964-19612-3.) Music examples, illustrations.

The term "canonization" applies to Bela Bartok in both senses of the word. First, he is one of the most performed and most studied composers of the twentieth century and a landmark figure in the history of ethnomusicology. Second, because of the potent combination of his nationalist rhetoric, his advocacy for the peasant music of Hungarians and other groups in the region, and his international prominence as a composer, he has been an ideal candidate not just for performance and study but also true "musical sainthood," in the words of Malcolm Gillies ("The Canonization of Bela Bartok," in Bartok Perspectives: Man, Composer, & Ethnomusicologist [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 293). Recent scholarship has shown how Bartok's work was interpreted and reinterpreted as the model for whatever direction any given writer espoused for the country from the 1940s to the 1980s (cf. Danielle FoslerLussier, "Bartok Reception in Cold War...