Ligeti Kurt G And Hungarian Music During The Cold War

Orientalism and Musical Mission presents a new way of understanding music's connections with imperialism, drawing on new archive sources and interviews and using the lens of 'mission'. Rachel Beckles Willson demonstrates how institutions such as churches, schools, radio stations and governments, influenced by missions from Europe and North America since the mid-nineteenth century, have consistently claimed that music provides a way of understanding and reforming Arab civilians in Palestine. Beckles Willson discusses the phenomenon not only in religious and developmental aid circles where it has had strong currency, but also in broader political contexts. Plotting a historical trajectory from the late Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present time, the book sheds new light on relations between Europe, the USA and the Palestinians, and creates space for a neglected Palestinian music history.

A collection of specially commissioned essays investigating the extraordinary diversity of twentieth-century opera.

Ton de Leeuw was a truly groundbreaking composer. As evidenced by his pioneering study of compositional methods that melded Eastern traditional music with Western musical theory, he had a profound understanding of the complex and often divisive history of twentieth-century music. Now his renowned chronicle Music of the Twentieth Century is offered here in a newly revised English-language edition. Music of the Twentieth Century goes beyond a historical survey with its lucid and impassioned discussion of the elements, structures, compositional principles, and terminologies of twentieth-century music. De Leeuw draws on his experience as a composer, teacher, and music scholar of non-European music traditions, including Indian, Indonesian, and Japanese music, to examine how musical innovations that developed during the twentieth century transformed musical theory, composition, and scholarly thought around the globe.

This book examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. It presents a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid-to late-1950s. The author explores how the Communist parties in both countries expressed their attitudes to music of all kinds, and how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands. Based on a deep analysis of the archival and contemporary published sources on state, party, and professional organizations concerned with musical life, Tompkins argues that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, played a key role in instituting and maintaining the regimes of East Central Europe. As part of the Stalinist project to create and control a new socialist identity at the personal as well as collective level, the ruling parties in East Germany and Poland sought to saturate public space through the production of music. Politically effective ideas and symbols were introduced that furthered their attempts to, in the parlance of the day, "engineer the human soul." Music also helped the Communist parties establish legitimacy. Extensive state support for musical life encouraged musical elites and audiences to accept the dominant position and political missions of these regimes. Party leaders invested considerable resources in the attempt to create an authorized musical language that would secure and maintain hegemony over the cultural and wider social worlds. The responses of composers and audiences ran the gamut from enthusiasm to suspicion, but indifference was not an option.

György Kurtag's The Sayings of Peter Bornemisza (1963-68) is probably the most significant piece of music to have been composed in Hungary since the death of Bartók in 1945. Willson discusses the autobiographical associations in the piece, but also its essentially European character.