What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland

They also supply handy metaphors and fulfill a different function at each stage of his creative journey. References to childhood and youth, but also to synaeasthesia, dreams or imaginings, allow him to create his own, idiomatic narrative. Ligeti conducts a discourse on two planes, musical and verbal. However, the commentaries to compositions from the end of the 1950s or 60s were written concurrently.

The commentaries to works preceding his escape from Hungary in 1956 were written from a more distant time perspective, during the 1980s, 1990s, and even post-2000. The composer constantly kept returning to them, not only in interviews, but also in the descriptions of his compositions. György Ligeti spent most of his creative life in Austria and Germany, but his life „adventures” left an indelible mark on him. Your purchase will help support the second edition. Note: This book is available in printed form here. Writes one of his students, “it accomplishes what a textbook does without being a textbook.” Another says, “It gets right into the dirty details of Western music and does so in a way that makes even the most novice listener feel like a professional.” Explored and critiqued by more than two dozen readers from complete amateurs to working professionals, “Whaaaaaaaaat!?” is insightful, exuberant, funny and, according to one music professor, “terrifically valuable as a corrective to bad thinking and its offspring, bad teaching.” In a short, readable 100 pages, Bathory-Kitsz shares the madness and mystery of classical music.

Instead, “Whaaaaaaaaat!?” includes classical music-which the composer prefers to call “nonpop”-from ancient times right up to the present day, from Gregorian chant through electrons and gongs to nonpop fused with pop. Written in response to a student’s plea for help (“I’m desperate! I don’t get classical music!”), the book is not stuck in the distant past.

Beginning with patterns, pitches and instruments, author Dennis Bathory-Kitsz covers topics from performers to shrieking singers to the mysterious classical codes, from Beethoven (“the great hulk of a man”) through space music, tone poems, nationalism, and even composers insulting each other. It is a concise and helpful book with humor and insight written by a composer and performer with a lifetime of experience. “Whaaaaaaaaat!? I Don’t Get Classical Music: A Self-Help Desperation Guide” is a tonic for the perplexed, and a companion guide for those who feel classical music is forbidding, complex and grandiose.

What to Listen for in Music by Aaron Copland