Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile: Interpreting the Music of István Anhalt, György Kurtág, and Sándor Veress

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List of Examples
List of Plates and Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction Friedemann Sallis
First Word
1 Istvan Anhalt: A Character Sketch John Beckwith (University of Toronto)
2 Kurtag, as I Know Him Gergely Szokolay
3 ""A Kind of Musical Autobiography"": Reading Traces in Sandor Veress's Orbis tonorum Claudio Veress
Place and Displacement
4 Of the Centre, Periphery; Exile, Liberation; Home and the Self Istvan Anhalt (Queen's University)
5 Istvan Anhalt's Kingston Triptych Robin Elliott (University of Toronto)
6 Istvan Anhalt's The Tents Of Abraham: Where Music Cannot Heal, Let It Be Restored William Benjamin (University of British Columbia)
7 Which Displacement? Tracing Exile in the Postwar Compositions of Istvan Anhalt and Matyas Seiber Florian Scheding (University of Southampton)
8 Letters to America Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
9 Roots and Routes: Travel and Translation in Istvan Anhalt's Operas Gordon Smith (Queen's University)
10 Le fonds Istvan Anhalt (MUS 164) a Bibliotheque et Archives Canada : auto-construction du compositeur et role du lieu dans son oeuvre Rachelle Chiasson-Taylor (Bibliotheque et archives Canada)
Perspectives on Reception, Analysis, and Interpretation
11 Sewing Earth to Sky: Istvan Anhalt and the Pedagogy of Transformation Austin Clarkson (York University)
12 Gyoergy Kurtag's Jatekok: A ""Voyage"" into the Child's Musical Mind Stefano Melis (Conservatorio di musica ""L. Canepa"" di Sassari)
13 Arracher la figure au figuratif: la musique vocale de Gyoergy Kurtag Alvaro Oviedo (Universite Paris 8, Vincennes Saint-Denis)
14 Dirges and Ditties: Gyoergy Kurtag's Latest Settings of Poetry by Anna Akhmatova Julia Galieva-Szokolay (Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto)
15 Interpreting Gyoergy Kurtag and George Crumb: Through the Looking Glass Dina Lentsner (Capital University, Columbus, Ohio)
The Presence of the Past and Memory in Contemporary Music
16 Gyoergy Kurtag et Walter Benjamin : considerations sur l'aura dans la musique Jean-Paul Olive (Universite Paris 8, Vincennes Saint-Denis)
17 What Presence of the Past? Artistic Autobiography in Gyoergy Kurtag's Music Ulrich Mosch (Paul Sacher Foundation)
18 ""Listening to inner voices"": Istvan Anhalt's Sonance*Resonance (Welche Toene?) Alan Gillmor (Carleton University)
19 Music Written from Memory in the Late Work of Istvan Anhalt Friedemann Sallis (University of Calgary)
Final Word
20 On Doubleness and Life in Canada: An Interview with Istvan Anhalt
The Contributors
Index

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About

This book examines the impact place and displacement can have on the composition and interpretation of Western art music, using as its primary objects of study the work of István Anhalt (1919-2012), György Kurtág (1926-), and Sándor Veress (1907-92). Although all three composers are of Hungarian origin, their careers followed radically different paths. Whereas, Kurtág remained in Budapest for most of his career, Anhalt and Veress left: the former in 1946 and immigrated to Canada and the latter in 1948 and settled in Switzerland. All three composers have had an extraordinary impact in the cultural environments within which their work took place.

In the first section, ""Place and Displacement,"" contributors examine what happens when composers and their music migrate in the culturally complex world of the late twentieth century. The past one hundred years produced record numbers of refugees, and this fact is now beginning to resonate in the study of music. As Anhalt himself forcefully asserts, however, not all composers who emigrate should be understood as exiles. The first chapters of this book explore some of the problems and questions surrounding this issue.

Essays in the second section, ""Perspectives on Reception, Analysis, and Interpretation,"" look at how performing acts of interpretation on music implies bringing the time, place, and identity of the musician, the analyst, and the teacher to bear on the object of study. Like Kodály, Kurtág considers his work to be ""naturally"" embedded in Hungarian culture, but he is also a quintessentially European artist. Much of his production - he is one of the twentieth century's most prolific composers of vocal music - involves the setting of Hungarian texts, but in the late 1970s his cultural horizons expanded to include texts in Russian, German, French, English, and ancient Greek. The book explores how musicologists' divergent cultural perspectives impinge on the interpretation of this work.

The final section, ""The Presence of the Past and Memory in Contemporary Music,"" examines the impact time and memory can have on notions of place and identity in music. All living art taps into the personal and collective past in one way or another. The final four chapters look at various aspects of this relationship.

Reviews

Fontes Artis Musicae

The book's editors ... have shaped this diverse collection of approaches and perspectives into a wide-ranging but coherent whole, bringing together 'essays that examine how ideas of place and identity impinge on the creation, analysis, and interpretation of twentieth-century art music.'.... While Centre and Periphery is likely to be read primarily by those interested in the music of Veress, Kurtag, and Anhalt, it is a substantial contribution to the broader literature on identity and migration. With is emphasis on Anhalt, the book is a major contribution to the study of musical lie in post-WWII Canada.... The Wilfrid Laurier University Press deserves much praise for taking on this very worthy project and presenting it in this richly illustrated and finely edited form. This relatively small university press has rapidly carved out a niche with a number of titles on music in postwar Canada, among them In Search of Alberto Guerrero (2006), Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts (2010), Weinzweig (2011), and Beckwith's memoirs, Unheard Of (2012). The WLU Press has just issued Out of Time (2013), the biography of another Nazi-era refugee, the conductor, Georg Tintner. These twenty-first century assessments of recent history come not a moment too soon and have much to say about music and imagination in twentieth-century Canada. Both Centre and Periphery, Roots and Exile and Mapping Canada's Music tell the stories of individuals uprooted and forced to find new beginnings in a country that was accepting of their talents and that was enriched by their contributions

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