Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism, and the Absolute

Amy Bauer, Associate Professor of Music, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine, USA. Dr Bauer teaches courses on music theory and contemporary music.

'... many revealing observations... Given Ligeti‘s position as one of the great musical innovators of the last half-century, it is particularly important to be reminded that his sixty-year career, during which his style was seen to undergo some rather abrupt changes, is unified precisely by his strong links to the past.' Notes Writing from a broad cultural vantage, and with a style accessible to a wide readership, she examines Ligeti‘s music in light of the composer‘s own commentaries and essays, the music of his predecessors (e.g., Bartók, Bruckner, Beethoven, Debussy), and literary and artistic traditions that deal with the subject of lament ... I applaud Bauer in her efforts to situate Ligeti as a modernist subject and his music within a cultural nexus of ideologies based on Adorno, Benjamin, and others. And I hope that further scholarly dialogues on Ligeti will not shy away from exploring the significance of his music within a broad array of discourses, as Bauer bravely undertakes in this book. Music Theory Spectrum

• Contents: Preface; The cosmopolitan exception; Ligeti's Ur-Laments; Lament and the universal exception; The transparent tangle of history; The singular exotic; Lament and the absolute; Lament as genre; Select bibliography; Index.