Influential composer Ligeti dies
Austrian composer Gyorgy Ligeti, whose music appeared in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died aged 83.
He was known for his avant garde compositions, including the 1962 piece Poeme Symphonique, which is played on 100 metronomes.

His most famous works are those used in the Stanley Kubrick film, including Atmospheres and Lux Aeterna.

Ligeti was born in Romania in 1923 to Hungarian parents, and later adopted Austrian citizenship.

He began studying music at the conservatory in Cluj, Romania, in 1941 and continued his studies in Budapest.

In 1943 he was arrested and, because he was Jewish, was sentenced to forced labour for the rest of the Second World War.

Although Ligeti survived, the war claimed several members of his family – including his brother and his father.

Playful

After his release at the end of the war, he returned to Hungary, where he taught music at the Liszt Academy.

His musical ambitions were constrained by Hungary’s communist regime, with the result that much of his work from this period was based on folk music.

Following the 1956 uprising, Ligeti fled Hungary, settling in Vienna, Austria.

Here, he came into contact with avant garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Gottfried Michael Koenig.

After this time, his writing became more adventurous and playful – often challenging the conventions of music and performance.

Ligeti’s 1961 work, Future of Music – A Collective Composition, consists of the composer looking at the audience from the stage, and the audience’s reaction.

He wrote in a variety of styles, including chamber music, opera and electronic music.

In 2004, he was awarded Sweden’s prestigious Polar Music prize, and judges praised him for “stretching the boundaries of the musically conceivable”.

Ligeti is survived by his wife, Vera, and a son, Lukas, a percussionist who lives in New York.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/5072858.stm

Published: 2006/06/12 15:15:03 GMT

May 6, 2006
Page 1 of 4 | Single page
When the acclaimed Irish novelist John Banville won the Man Booker Prize last year, he didn’t hold back in his comments. He explains why to Angela Bennie.

WHEN JOHN Banville was announced the winner of the Man Booker Prize last year for his novel, The Sea, “a shocked hush fell on the glittering gathering”, as one report described it, and “ice began to form on their upper slopes”.

The shock was genuine. Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George had been the clear favourite, closely followed by previous Booker winner Katsuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Banville’s The Sea was a long shot, given its dark, dense, meditative mood, its preoccupation with grief and death, its highly self-conscious literariness.

That it had even made the shortlist surprised many – critical disdain had dismissed it as a book with “a lot of lovely language but not much novel”.

Circumnavigating the icy slopes, Banville made his way to the podium to receive his prize. In a low, steady voice of thanks, he said: “It is good to see a work of art being recognised!”

Many cheered, whether for the unapologetic arrogance of the remark or for the truth of it, or perhaps stirred by the whiff of drama in the room. But the sense of outrage among certain of the glitterati only ratcheted up a notch, to spew out the next day in newspaper column-centimetres of invective.

“Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest,” said the literary editor of The Independent, Boyd Tonkin. Another said Banville’s writing was “empty, vapid, cold, humourless, self-indulgent, snooty and pretentious”. A third was just “flabbergasted” at the result.

Banville wasn’t flabbergasted: he meant what he said, he says now from his home in Dublin, and repeats it – his book, The Sea, might be a novel, but it is, first and last, a work of art.

“I said it because I wanted to annoy them, all those literary London critics – they know how to turn the knife. Theirs is such a small world. So I decided to have a go at them. I meant what I said. I do think it good that a work of art has won.

“On the other hand, I do understand the point, why people might think a book like The Sea should not win the Booker. After all, the prize is there in order to keep people reading books, I understand that.

“So they think novels should be about identifiable things, that there should be a story, and all that. They believe that people when they read don’t want to have to think, they just want it to flow over them so they don’t have to think.

“But here is a book winning the Booker that is densely poetic. It is deliberately so. W. H. Auden used to say a poem is the only artform you have to either take or leave, there is no in-between.

“That is the quality I strive for in my writing. And for once they chose a book where the form is more significant than the content, a book that is a work of art, in other words. That is what I am saying.”

It is at this point that Banville now gives a quiet, devilish chuckle – or could it just be a moment of static on the line from Dublin?

“On the other had, all that reaction in the room might be all to do with the fallout from that other matter. You know, the McEwan thing.”

The McEwan thing was the savaging he had given Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, some months before in The New York Review of Books, and the literary spat that followed it in the NYRB’s letters page. Saturday (which was long-listed for the Booker) was a “dismayingly bad book”, he had written in his review, “a self-satisfied and . . . ridiculous novel”, its set pieces “hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s erector set”.

The “small world” that is the London literary scene exploded and divided for and against Banville’s critique “right down the middle”, Banville says with satisfaction.

“That cheered me up enormously.” There it was again, that now unmistakeable sound of a chuckle filled with wry pleasure. “But then when John Sutherland (who just happened to be the chairman of the judging panel of the Booker) joined in the fray on McEwan’s behalf, I thought to myself, well, there goes my chance at the Booker.”

As it turned out he had underestimated the Booker chairman. With the judges locked in disagreement to the very end, it was Sutherland’s casting vote that gave the Booker to Banville. The whole thing had been “painful”, Sutherland admitted publicly, “it was by no means a decision of acclamation”.

But in the end, and in the words of the judges collectively, the prize simply had to go to Banville’s “extraordinary meditation on identity and remembrance”, so “utterly compelling, profoundly moving and illuminating, it is unquestionably one of the finest works yet from a sublime master of language”.

This sublime master of language has all his writing life been striving to bring his kind of fiction to that condition of poetry Auden speaks of.

He remembers with amusement his first clumsy, overblown attempt at an opening line for a novel he was attempting at the age of 12: “The petals of white May blossom swooned slowly into the black mouth of the open grave.”

Fourteen novels later, and each sentence, each finely wrought paragraph, is crafted in such a way that the reader has no choice but to go with him into a Banville place, a place both enchanting and disturbing. This place is highly sensuous, where smells are pungent and rank, putting all the senses on edge, where light casts ambiguous shadows, and the language sometimes seems cloaked with inexplicable menace and uncertainty – everything so finely tuned it is as if the whole edifice is balanced delicately on the cusp of the irrational. It is the kind of writing where there is no in-between, you have to take his fiction as a whole or leave it.

“I spend hour upon hour on a sentence and a paragraph,” says Banville. “That’s why I say I hate my books, every one of them. It is because I cannot read them. I know them so intimately, I am so knowledgeable about each part of it, I cannot read it as a reader would.

“When I do, I always see how I can make them better. I think they are just not good enough, compared with the idea of them. I read them with a kind of profound embarrassment.”

Writing fiction, Banville says, is like trying to write a dream.

“At least, that is the kind of fiction I write.

“You are saying to yourself, I am going to take this dream I have in my head and find the language for it, find how to put it into words. That is fiction; and the only analogy I can think of for it is the dream.”

When we dream, says Banville, we dream the most fantastic, complex things. This is what he wants his fiction to be.

“In my kind of dream, you can’t let your mind wander away. Some people don’t want that kind of reading experience, I understand that.

“In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high. It is strange, the imagination, the human imagination, don’t you think? What it does? And how we inhabit other people’s imaginations?”

Banville breaks off and then, quite unexpectedly, as if prompted by something or someone lurking in his own imagination, he says: “You know, I am having a shot at that other kind of writing that I was talking about. Only it won’t be me, it will be Benjamin Black writing it.

“These books Benjamin Black will write, they will not be the kind of books John Banville writes. They will be the kind Benjamin Black writes.”

Benjamin Black is Banville’s newly minted pseudonym. He was born in Banville’s imagination one day recently when he had just finished reading a Georges Simenon detective story.

“Those novels of Simenon, the neglected ones, what I call his hard novels, those novels to me they are the great unacknowledged novels of the 20th century. They are magnificent. And I thought to myself, well, if you can do this with unadorned prose, then I am going to have a go at it, too.

“So this novel Benjamin Black has written (Christine Falls, Banville’s attempt at a detective story), which is me as Benjamin Black, is a piece of craftwork,” says Banville. “It is not an art book, it is completely different to my usual work.”

Nor will Banville let Black take any notice of the critics, whatever they might say of his craftwork. Banville does not read his critics; he does not write for them, he says. He writes “to delight and terrify” his readers.

There is one review, however, that he does cherish.

“It was in 1989 for The Book of Evidence (which was also shortlisted for the Booker that year). I was running for the train and a workman came toward me on a bike, and as he rode past me he yelled out ‘Great f–kin’ book!” and whistled by. That was the best – best! – review I have ever had.

“I suppose the point I am trying to make is that the truth is that all kinds of people read my books.

“It is one world we live in, but our experience of it is different. I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what’s the point of the art of writing if it doesn’t take you into the mysterious?”

John Banville will be a guest at an Age Dymocks book event on May 30. Bookings and information: 9660 8500.

He is a guest at this month’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. The Sea is published by Picador; Christine Falls will be published by Picador in October.

John Banville

1945 Born December 8, in Wexford, Ireland. Educated at Christian Brothers’ School and St Peter’s College, Wexford.

1970 Publishes first book, Long Lankin, a collection of stories.

1971 Publishes first novel, Nightspawn.

1973 Second novel, Birchwood.

1976 Dr Copernicus, first in series of novels about science, wins James Tait Prize.

1981 Kepler wins Guardian fiction prize.

1982 The Newton Letter.

1986 Mefisto .

1989 The Book of Evidence shortlisted for Booker Prize.

1988-99 Literary editor of Irish Times.

1993 Ghosts.

1995 Athena.

1996 The Ark.

1997 The Untouchable.

2000 Eclipse.

2002 Shroud.

2003 Prague Pictures.

2005 Most recent novel, The Sea, wins Booker Prize.

Dillon, James (b. October 29, 1950, Glasgow, Scotland). Esteemed British composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal, and piano works that have been performed throughout the world.

Mr. Dillon is self-taught as a composer. He had early experiences with traditional bagpipe music and in the late 1960s, he played with his band Influx. He studied art and design at the Glasgow School of Art in 1968, linguistics at the University College of London in 1970 and piano with Eleanor Purse in 1970-71. Later, he studied acoustics at the University of North London in 1971, Indian rhythm with Punita Gupta in 1971-72 and mathematics with Gordon Millar at the Tavistock Institute in London in 1972 and attended computer music seminars at IRCAM in 1984-85.

He has earned many honors, including First Prize in the competition of the Huddersfield Festival (1978) and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at Darmstadt (1982) and he was named Classical Musician of the Year by the Sunday Times in London (1989). More recent awards include a fellowship from the Japan Foundation (1996) and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize (1998, for Traumwerk, Book 1), as well as the prize International Distinguished Fellow from New York University (2001) and numerous commissions from the European City of Culture. His music has been heard at major festivals throughout the world, including the Huddersfield (1983, 1996), the Musica in Strasbourg (1990, 2002) and the Tage für Neue Musik in Zürich (2001-02). In addition, retrospectives of his work have been given in Paris (1985), Oslo (1989), Toulouse (1991), Brussels (1992), and New York (2001).

Mr. Dillon taught at Darmstadt from 1982-92, directed the composition faculty at the Gothenburg Summer Academy in 1991 and served as co-composer-in-residence with Brian Ferneyhough at Royaumont in 1996. He taught as a guest composer at Goldsmiths College at the University of London in 1989-90 and 1991-92 and at the University of Central England in Birmingham in 1993-94 and 1995-96. He has guest-lectured in Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA, including at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2003.

Edition Peters publishes his music.

CONTACT INFORMATION

Street address: Mr. James Dillon, c/o Edition Peters, 10-12 Baches St., London N1 6DN, UK

COMPLETE LIST OF WORKS

STAGE: Philomela (opera), 3 voices, small orchestra (18 players), live electronics, 2003-04

ORCHESTRAL: Windows and Canopies, small orchestra (20 players), 1985; Überschreiten, small orchestra (16 players), 1986; helle Nacht, large orchestra (90 players), 1986-87; Introitus – Nine Rivers 8, 11/12 strings, tape, live electronics, 1989-90; ignis noster, large orchestra (100 players), 1991-92; Blitzschlag, flute, large orchestra (66 players), 1988-96; Via Sacra, large orchestra, 2000; Violin Concerto, 2000; La navette, large orchestra, 2000-01

CHAMBER MUSIC: Crossing Over, clarinet, 1978; Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha, drumkit, 1979; …Once upon a Time, alto flute (+ piccolo), oboe (+ English horn), clarinet, bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, double bass, 1980; Parjanya-Vata, cello, 1981; East 11th St. NY 10003 – Nine Rivers 1, 6 percussion, 1982; String Quartet No. 1, 1983; Zone (…de azul), clarinet, French horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, cello, piano, 1983; Le rivage, flute (+ piccolo, alto flute), oboe, clarinet (+ bass clarinet), French horn, bassoon, 1984; Sgothan, flute, 1984; Diffraction, piccolo, 1984; Shrouded Mirrors, guitar, 1988; Del Cuarto Elemento, violin, 1988; L’ÉCRAN parfum – Nine Rivers 2, 6 violins, 3 percussion, 1988; La femme invisible – Nine Rivers 4, flute (+ piccolo), alto flute (+ bass flute), oboe, English horn (+ oboe), clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 soprano saxophones (2nd + alto saxophone), piano, 3 percussion, 1989; L’oeuvre au Noir – Nine Rivers 6, bass flute (+ alto flute, piccolo, triangle), bassoon (+ contrabassoon, crotales), tenor-bass trombone, bass trombone, harp (+ sleigh bells), 2 celli (1st + rainstick, 2nd + crotales), double bass (+ sleigh bells), 2 percussion, live electronics, 1990; éileadh sguaibe – Nine Rivers 7, 2 French horns, 2 trumpets, tenor-bass trombone, bass trombone, tuba, 2 percussion, live electronics, 1990; String Trio, violin, viola, cello, 1990-91; nuée, bass clarinet, 2 percussion ad libitum, 1991 (section of L’évolution du vol; may be performed separately); String Quartet No. 2, 1991

CHAMBER MUSIC: Siorram, viola, 1992; Lumen naturae, violin, viola, cello, 1992; Vernal Showers, violin, ensemble (flute [+ piccolo, alto flute], oboe, harp, guitar, mandolin, viola, cello, double bass, harpsichord, percussion), 1992; l’ascension, 2 percussion, 1993 (section of L’évolution du vol; may be performed separately); le vent, l’arbre et le temps, double bass, 1993 (section of L’évolution du vol; may be performed separately); Redemption, clarinet, violin, piano, 1995; Traumwerk, Book 1, 2 violins, 1995-96; Todesengel, clarinet, vibraphone, 1996; String Quartet No. 3, 1998; Eos, cello, 1999; La coupure – Nine Rivers 5, percussion, live electronics, 1989-2000; Two Studies, accordion, 2001; Traumwerk, Book 2, violin, harpsichord, 2001; Traumwerk, Book 3, violin, piano, 2001-02; The Soadie Waste, piano, string quartet, 2002-03

CHORAL: Viriditas – Nine Rivers 3, 16 mixed voices, 1993-94; Oceanos – Nine Rivers 9, 16 mixed voices, orchestra, live electronics, 1985-96; Hyades, 12 mixed voices, 1998; residue…, 24 mixed voices, 1998-99; Vapor Musik, 4 mixed voices, string quartet, 1999

VOCAL: Who do you love, female voice, flute (+ piccolo, bass flute), clarinet, violin (+ viola), cello, percussion, 1980-81; Evening Rain, voice, 1981; Come live with me, female voice, flute (+ piccolo, alto flute), oboe (+ oboe d’amore, English horn), piano, percussion, 1981-82; A Roaring Flame, female voice, double bass, 1981-82; Time Lag Zero, female voice, viola, 1982; L’évolution du vol, female voice (+ hurdy-gurdy), E-flat clarinet (+ bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet), double bass, piano (+ harmonium), 2 percussion, 1991-93 (sections 2-7 of its eight sections may be performed separately: l’homme et la vérité, female voice, piano; l’ascension; l’être-ange, female voice [+ hurdy-gurdy], E-flat clarinet; nuée; descente/désir, female voice, bass clarinet, double bass; le vent, l’arbre et le temps)

PIANO: Dillug-Kefitsah, 1976; Spleen, 1980; black/nebulae, 2 pianos, 1995; Book of Elements 1, 1997; Book of Elements 3, 2000; Book of Elements 2, 2001; Book of Elements 4, 2002; Book of Elements 5, 2002

HARPSICHORD: Birl, 1986

TV PRODUCTION (DIRECTOR): Temp’est, female voice, flute, piccolo, oboe, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, bass trombone, electric guitar, string quartet, double bass, piano, 2 percussion, 1994 (Simon Reynell)