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Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination.

Article Excerpt
By Richard Steinitz. London: Faber and Faber; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. [xvii, 499 p. ISBN 1-55553-551-8. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, glossary, discography, bibliography, index.

Prior to this book by Richard Steinitz, the main sources of biographical detail about the events in prominent twentieth-century composer Gyorgy Ligeti's life were anecdotes he related in response to questions by interviewers. As most of the published interviews (pp. 395-97) were commissioned in connection with the publication or performance of a specific work or works, their presentation of Ligeti's biography is at best fragmentary, and sometimes also contradictory, because he related information about an event in different ways depending oil the wording of the interviewer's question, the context in which it was posed, and the point be wanted to make for that audience, rather than in a broader historical context. Yet from those detached anecdotes, it is clear that there are specific connections to be drawn between the dramatic events of Ligeti's life and his compositional choices, and that knowing the circumstances in which his compositions were written contributes to a fuller understanding of his creative imagination and compositional genius.

Steinitz's account of events in Ligeti's life reads at times like...

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