Room '200 blue'

A door ajar and a gateway to the world - memories of the 80s with György Ligeti

A journey into the unknown, but hopeful for the future?
I arrived in Hamburg in August 1985. The door to the apartment on the second floor in Mövenstraße greeted me ajar and with a voice: "Come in". I was a little nervous and suddenly saw the master in front of me. Is this all real or just a dream? I heard the name György Ligeti for the first time at the end of 1980.
China had just reopened to the world after 30 years of isolation. At that time, I was like a frog in a well and believed the world was as big as a shining full moon.

A little information about my first music contacts
As a teenager in the early 70s, I heard European classical music for the first time through a few 78 gram vinyl records that my father owned. After a while, I secretly listened to the tapes of Debussy, Bartók and Stravinsky. At that time, such music was still forbidden. In 1980 I began to study composition in Beijing and five years later with Ligeti in Hamburg. In 1986 I got to know the Darmstadt Summer Courses and a year later the Donaueschingen Music Days. I have been a composer ever since.

Studying with Ligeti
The lessons always began on Wednesdays at 3 p.m. and went on until late at night at his home. Everyone brought their own score so that everyone could read it. Ligeti usually asked for opinions before ending the discussion with his words. One day I was about to present my compositions. I had brought three pieces with me from my time in Beijing: a violin concerto, a piano quintet and several short piano solos.

When I left my hometown, I was looking forward to catching up. Catching up was supposed to mean learning and mastering all modern composition techniques. My expectations were not fulfilled that day. On the contrary, Ligeti was less enthusiastic about my violin concerto and said that although it was technically well done,
it was too much influenced by the Polish school. Unexpectedly, he paid more attention to the piano quintet.
I was hardly touched by the Western. Instead, I had ideas based on the Peking Opera or a speech melody that I could shape freely. Ligeti encouraged me to "continue on this path". Although I didn't really understand the exact meaning of this phrase at the time, I began to write a new piece with this idea in mind.
At the beginning of June 1986, I already had part of the score for the First String Quartet. I showed it to the class. Ligeti waited a while and said: "This music is strange to me. ... It has to be played", "Go to Arditti" ...

Visit to the Darmstadt Summer Courses and the Donaueschenger Musiktage
"Musical window opened", "Vital", as his teacher György Ligeti wrote in his report, ...", as it was written in the regional newspaper (Stadt Darmstadt July 1986).
Friedrich Hommel told me that without Ligeti's words he would never have been able to get me the scholarship for Darmstadt. When he received this letter, there was only a month to go before the courses started.
When I returned to Hamburg from the south in August, I found a letter in my letterbox from Josef Häusler from Baden-Baden. In it he asked about my music and the unfinished quartet. It wasn't until October 1987 that I realized the significance of the small town of Donaueschingen in the Black Forest.

A look back: a journey into the unknown, but hopeful for the future?
In July 1985, I completed my studies in Beijing and boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway on July 31. The train headed west. The journey took seven days, one change in Moscow, through Warsaw to East Berlin. I walked over the Berlin Wall to West Berlin with two suitcases and continued on to Hamburg the next day.
The journey, especially the stretch in the former USSR, was not at all smooth, in fact it was very dramatic. I was detained at the Russian-Polish border for more than two hours. To this day, I can't explain how I regained my freedom without losing anything. I must have been protected by God.
My experience became the story that Ligeti told again and again.

Entrance examination and then
1985 was a strong year in terms of numbers. Hans Peter Reutter from Germany, Sidney Corbett from the USA, Kiyoshi Furukawa from Japan, Unsuk Chin from South Korea and myself from China took part in the entrance examination. The day after the entrance exam, I went back to Ligeti. "You did well in the exam...", "Whether you get a place or not, you are already my student".
After listening to my plan, he said to me: "You have to learn German at a Goethe-Institut right away". He pulled two large banknotes out of his pocket. "How can I give you the money back?" I asked him cautiously. He smiled and answered me: "You can pay me back when you've become famous in twenty years' time"...

Beyond composing
Once he asked me to hang out with him for a while after the lesson and told me a lot about his sad past, the loss of his father and brother, the 60s and 70s and so on. That's when I realized that what he did and how he treated me meant a lot more than just the music or composing itself. Is it because of similar backgrounds, similar experiences and pain? Never give up and go forward with a fighting spirit.

Another look back: cultural and political context
At the end of 1972, before the end of the so-called "Cultural Revolution", a cellist from Switzerland performed a repertoire consisting mainly of Johann Sebastian Bach to an audience selected by the government in Beijing. He was invited by the Chinese government. The following year, the London Philharmonic Orchestra played music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms and others in
Beijing. In the summer, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performed with Claudio Abbado in China. These programs stood in stark contrast to the propaganda music that was played daily on radio stations. Jiang Qing - Mao Zedong's wife - directly directed the projects, whose motto was the
political slogan: "Serve the past for the present and let foreign things serve China". In practical terms, this opened a small window for me to come into contact with foreign cultures.

It was only with the death of Mao Zedong on September 9, 1976 that China experienced a major turning point. The violin virtuosos Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin came to Beijing in 1979 and taught in Beijing. China entered a flourishing age ideologically. What had previously been forbidden was now legal again. Modern art, which had been called "bourgeois corrupt art" in the
past, was once again included in the crystallization of human civilization. A group of young people reacted enthusiastically and wanted to reclaim everything they had lost and quickly return to the world. It was this personal experience of mine that attracted Ligeti.
It's not easy to understand all this if you don't know China at that time. Cultural expressions are very open in many countries, but China at that time was a vacuum and the "destiny" of the people was not in their own hands. The so-called vacuum meant that no one was allowed to know about open culture. A bird locked in a cage can see the space around the cage, but it is absolutely impossible to reach that open space. A generation of colleagues older than me who tried to write modern music in the 50s and 60s found themselves in life-threatening situations.
Like a thirsty and hungry person, extreme overreactions can take many forms. Once really free, there seems to be a strange feeling of joy, passion, curiosity, but also insecurity, disorientation and even fear.

Cultural identity and artistic orientation
I grew up in a country far away from Europe, with specific cultural characteristics. This can be a "weak point" when I deal with European music. For a while I had the oppressive feeling that many people in other Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, even in some South Asian countries, knew much more than I did. It took me a while to overcome the "shortcomings" I had in my childhood and adolescence and this "shadow"! After many years, this has turned into positive energy. I thank my mentor Ligeti for that! To this day, I like to describe myself as a person who "accidentally" slipped into a group of composers and who caught the last train halfway.
At the time, I had no idea about the "composing profession", but I was determined. Ligeti did a lot for me. Not only that, he also set me on the path of a composer - as an irreplaceable and unmistakable person. As a challenge, according to Ligeti, originality should always be in the foreground for him.

The Ligeti class and the importance of composing
During those years, I was part of a close working team. There are some people in the group whom I sincerely thank because they helped me, such as Tamae, Kiyoshi, Manfred, etc. The one who took care of me the most was Louise Duchesneau, like my big sister. Composing is now a much bigger part of my life than it was 38 years ago. For me, it is the most important form of fixing and expressing inner thoughts and
feelings. Music is a reaction medium to my perception and world view. A serious and self-critical attitude is very important. It is equally important to be courageous instead of hesitating or waiting. To make all this possible, I would like to thank my teacher Ligeti, who showed me a way. He changed my life and helped me to concentrate on writing music for almost 20 years without any financial burden. Here I take the liberty of revealing a small part of the "secret":

"Dec. 1, 94
Dear Huihong,
dear Xiaoyong,
warmest congratulations for VERONIKA!
I think as a birth gift it is more practical if you choose what is necessary -
therefore please accept the enclosed sum - real and symbolic,
Your György Ligeti"

remembered by Prof. Xiaoyong Chen
Hamburg, January 12, 2023

Craft and aesthetics - György Ligeti as a teacher

I.
From 1975, when I joined György Ligeti's composition class as a student (as an "extraordinary student", as they called it in Hamburg at the time, because I had already completed my composition studies with a diploma) until his retirement in 1988, I worked with Ligeti, first as his student, then as his assistant. We always got on brilliantly in matters of compositional craft, although we felt quite differently about aesthetic issues. Perhaps this difference is not the worst prerequisite for reflecting on the relationship between craft and aesthetics on the basis of memories of Ligeti as a teacher.

It must have been in 1976 that Ligeti and his class were spending their lunch break in the "Café Bohème" near the conservatory, as they often did, when he said: "Actually, every one of you should be doing counterpoint with me, very strict Bach style, like I learned in Budapest with Farkas - that's very useful for composing. But unfortunately I don't get to do it with everyone - that's why when I was appointed I was assured that I could employ an assistant. This assistant is supposed to take over the counterpoint lessons for future students. Would any of you like to do that? That would mean a very hard apprenticeship of 2 years with me, there will be no time for composing, and after that I will negotiate with the university about teaching hours." I still don't understand why I was the only one who got in touch. Well, I come from a family of church musicians and grew up with Bach's music, so I thought I had a good feel for the style, and my first teacher Ernst Gernot Klussmann had already given me a good grounding in counterpoint, but not in the Bach style.

My counterpoint lessons with Ligeti were very intensive. In contrast to composition lessons, which took place almost exclusively in a group, these were now individual lessons. Ligeti had an incredibly keen ear for inconsistencies in style, whether it was that a modulation in the dominant key was a little too long or that there was a stylistically disputable six-four chord. However, he himself was now too far removed from the practice of Bach's style to be able to suggest concrete improvements - I had to find them out for myself. After a 3-part fugue with a chromatic theme, which could be mirrored as a whole along the lines of the "Art of Fugue", after a 5-part chorale prelude with cantus firmus in the canon and a 3-part chorale arrangement with cantus firmus in the bass and two upper voices in the canon, he shook my hand and declared me a "master of counterpoint". The apprenticeship only lasted a year and a quarter, and I composed my "Concerto for Viola da Gamba and Orchestra" along the way.

In 1977, I received a teaching position at the Hamburg Academy of Music for music theory, including assisting in György Ligeti's composition class. In addition to teaching counterpoint to all composers studying with him from then on (some came from abroad for a year, some had already completed their studies), my work soon also included the entire theory area (harmony, Bach and Palestrina counterpoint, classical instrumentation, modulation, cadenza playing, etc.) for all those who were aiming for a diploma at the Musikhochschule Hamburg.

In order to keep in touch with Ligeti and to follow the compositional development of my counterpoint students, I repeatedly took part in the class lessons at irregular intervals and also presented my new compositions there. Occasionally, Ligeti even asked me for support, for example in the case of a student who presented an incredibly complex orchestral work and stubbornly claimed that it was audible. Ligeti was of a completely different opinion and finally asked me to explain why the score could not be heard through. I tried to explain to the student that you have to bundle events into layers and compose overarching processes and developments - Ligeti was obviously very satisfied with my explanation, and the performance must have proved us both right.

As much as the impression arose that Ligeti demanded absolute professionalism in terms of craftsmanship, his doubts about this ideal could hardly be ignored. He was also fascinated by the idea - or should we say the phantom? - of an untrained original genius. Mussorgsky was such an example for him, as a counter-image to the sometimes somewhat academic professionalism of Rimsky-Korsakov. He repeatedly flirted with the cultural area of the American West Coast, which was largely unencumbered by European culture and European standards. But he could not decide to move from Hamburg to Los Angeles, as he knew all too well that he needed the European cultural space in which he was rooted.

Nevertheless, the question: "Can a good craft also hinder a composer?" kept coming up.

II.
Now the term "craft" has a whole range of facets - the lowest level refers to the mastery of certain compositional techniques of one's own tradition, such as counterpoint as a technique for mastering the simultaneity of several meaningful events, but also the mastery of harmony and the classical language of form. Indeed, craft in this sense harbors the danger of relying on tried and tested, traditional solutions, especially if a composer has a good command of them. In this sense, craftsmanship can be "conservative", and something revolted against this in Ligeti. Ligeti was not only a cultivated connoisseur of Bach's style, but also someone who liked to break taboos, destroy conventions and transgress boundaries set by good craftsmanship.

But a composer who wants more than just breaking taboos and shattering tradition must nevertheless have a certain level of craftsmanship in order to be able to realize his ideas. A higher level of craft would be that which makes it possible to formulate ideas vividly, to get to the point precisely, as it were, to develop a feeling for conciseness. At this level, the composer is no longer bound by the rules and conventions of the lower level of craftsmanship - well-known examples are the "Puccini fifths" and Debussy's parallel mixtures. Craftsmanship in the sense of producing concise characters is anything but conservative, but is prepared to break conventions and rules in the service of a vivid new image, not as an end in itself. Such a feeling for conciseness cannot be developed well enough, and it is lacking in those composers who only deliver well-crafted work (in the sense of the lower level), be it the Mendelssohn epigones of the 19th century or the Ligeti epigones of the 20th century. Ligeti is said to have once said of a well-crafted piece: "But it doesn't flourish." This very nicely describes the missing step towards a concise, sculptural form. Nevertheless, one must master the lower level of craftsmanship to a certain extent in order to be able to move confidently at the higher level. For Ligeti, Hamburg has always triumphed over Los Angeles.

In terms of this higher level of craftsmanship, Ligeti reacted almost allergically to the clichés and conventions of contemporary music. I had felt this myself, because my first attempt to join his class in 1973, immediately after his appointment, failed. I had presented a "concert piece for piano and chamber orchestra" that began with the minor second e-f, then a cluster built up, very similar to the first movement of Ligeti's cello concerto. That was the end of my piece - I'm not sure whether he had taken any notice of what happened next: the cluster was followed by a figured A flat major dominant seventh chord, then the notes that didn't belong to D flat major were filtered out in several attempts until the piece ended with a D flat major triad. A very original idea, but the piece is not really good ...

Later, his scathing judgment was concentrated in the movement. "That sounds like modern music!" He hated the conventions of the new music that filled the programs of music festivals and expected a personal signature, even originality, and seemed to have forgotten that he himself had only found his own style after phases of Bartok imitation. There was little room for learning by imitation in his lessons, nor for a slow, gradual becoming original, and this was a dramatic problem for very young students, which could lead to serious crises and even to them giving up composing. So it was better to have already begun or completed studies elsewhere and to enter Ligeti's class at an age when one's own path was at least beginning to emerge. The discussions in class were tough enough - Ligeti himself, as a linguistic genius, which he was, took a thieving pleasure in spiteful and hurtful formulations that often hit the bull's eye, and the desire to distinguish himself and the rivalries of his fellow students, who then also attacked the work under discussion, sometimes caused the criticism to escalate threateningly - now and again it almost came to tears. In later years, Ligeti became milder, much to the displeasure of a student from the early years, who dropped by and, in the style of the early days, now started to go wild himself, the group followed ... the victim of the scathing criticism was my piano trio "Elegies and Capricci". When the work was performed and broadcast on the radio, most of them suddenly thought it was good, and one of them said disarmingly: "We just can't read a score."

The discussion rarely focused on technical problems or compositional details (except occasionally on instrumentation and sound), but rather on aesthetic issues. Since the late 1970s, when postmodernism also entered music with the "New Simplicity", the question of a new romanticism has been central, and with it the question: What can and may one compose today? to what extent may one fall back on tradition in harmony and formal language (melody was not yet up for debate)?

For all his criticism of the avant-garde and the long-hardened conventions of contemporary music, Ligeti rejected any backward-looking approach - and yet he himself was not free of it. We once tried to make it clear to him that "San Francisco Polyphony" was actually a rather romantic piece - he became smaller and smaller in his chair ... In fact, Ligeti's own works were characterized by this ambivalence: on the one hand, the search for new paths and the longing for total openness, and on the other, the connection to tradition, which he was then massively reproached for on the occasion of his trio for violin, horn and piano at the symposium in Graz in 1984. Ligeti now found himself in the same dock on which he was so fond of placing some of his pupils.

III.
The openness to the world in the Ligeti class was unique, on the one hand because of the students who came from other countries and cultures (Japan, Korea, China, Central America). As a rule, they came to Hamburg with the desire to get to know the music of the Western avant-garde better - and were encouraged by Ligeti to search for the roots of their own culture in Germany. They were not supposed to learn to speak the international avant-garde Esperanto that Ligeti was so sensitive to, but rather to deal specifically with the musical language of their own tradition. There were indeed interesting developments in this area, and Ligeti's teaching had a great impact in this area in particular.

On the other hand, Ligeti was incredibly curious about all kinds of music, always bringing new things with him and introducing them to us - be it works by Harry Partch, Conlon Narcorrow, music from Indonesia, Africa and Mongolia. Jazz and pop were also discussed, as well as the music of the late Middle Ages, known under the term "ars subtilior" - all of which broadened our horizons far beyond what is strictly speaking referred to as classical tradition and avant-garde. It proved to be a great advantage that Ligeti had meanwhile moved his lessons to his apartment. This meant that all the scores and recordings he wanted to show us were at hand. He was particularly curious about other tuning systems and microtonality, as well as other ways of structuring rhythm. This showed that Ligeti was just as much a seeker as his students, and it was this shared search and mutual inspiration that made the class meetings so fruitful. Ligeti also learned from his students and took up suggestions - he mentioned this himself several times. Every point of view was exposed to criticism, which could be harsh, but those who then continued on their path did so more consciously and more confidently. The composers of Ligeti's class are characterized by a high degree of awareness, a high level of musical reflection.

The older Ligeti became, the more he included his own earlier works in the critical discourse. However, it was a delicate matter to criticize Ligeti's music - he could react very sensitively, even admitting this in a situation where some made fun of just one page from one of his scores, which consisted of only a few notes and an incredible number of performance notes. At the time when he was working on the opera "Le Grand Macabre", he showed me pages that had just been completed. I was bold enough to point out what I saw as a dramatic formal problem: After all, he wanted to insert closed sections into the recitative-like, loose texture, and I pointed out to him that a uniform structure does not guarantee a closed formal section, more formal internal structure would have to be added - a uniform structure only breaks things up and does not prevent the music from meandering from detail to detail. It was precisely this impression from the score pages that was confirmed when listening to the work. Ligeti later mentioned that he had thought a lot about my criticism. Perhaps this point is one of the reasons why Ligeti ultimately considered the opera a failure.

IV.
"Quality always conveys the impression of an orderly, intact world" - perhaps this sentence, uttered by a conservative (Michael Braunfels 1975, p. 79), contains insights worth considering. But what if a composer perceives his world as chaotic and disorderly and this is also expressed in his music - is quality in the highest sense then unattainable for him?

In an interview (Dibelius 1994, p. 256), Ligeti associated the "ars subtilior", to which he felt particularly drawn, with the plague, the Hundred Years' War between England and France and the schism (two popes, in Rome and Avignon). Did he ever relate the music of his generation and his own to the experiences of the Second World War, the persecution of the Jews and the Cold War? To my knowledge, he never commented on this, but the parallel between the 14th and 20th centuries, which he himself suggests, would at least suggest this question. This could shed new light on the relationship between craftsmanship and aesthetics in the second half of the 20th century.

It is possible that the values and ideals of a culture are encoded in craftsmanship in the very highest sense, as embodied by Bach and Mozart: in the balance of emotion and reason, in the relationship between part and whole (decipherable with Schiller as an image of the individual and society), and thus in the richness of relationships, in the interrelatedness of the parts, and in the question of musical time (as an attempt to create a comprehensible succession) and thus in the significance of form, indeed of the great form. Ligeti was honest enough to avoid the great form - he regarded my own attempts in this direction with a certain ironic skepticism, as if I were running after a completely outdated ideal. I also don't remember that questions of form, formal development and formal balance played a role in the class discussions. What was more important to Ligeti was the plasticity of the idea, the individual tone, the originality - at best, it was "crazy", a bit weird and somehow sensational.

A remark that moved and occupied me for a long time came after he had read the score of my composition "Abendländisches Lied" for cor anglais and orchestra: "You must be a happy person." At first I wanted to protest, but then left it at that - in fact, happiness is not something that is generally associated with artists of the 20th century. And yet this remark gives an idea of the aesthetic difference between the two of us. Ligeti probably saw himself more as a "musicien maudit" - not to say "poet maudit", a type first lived by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, feeling outside of society, at odds with himself and the world and drawing his creative energy from this. Ligeti was also no stranger to cynicism and self-hatred.

In the first years I was in the class, it was often about the attitude of "coolness" in contemporary music, not just in jazz. For many, "cool" seemed to be an ideal that remained completely alien to me personally. Ligeti himself saw himself in the tradition of "cool" composers, hence his affinity with Stravinsky. However, the literary scholar Helmut Lethen's study "Behavioral Lessons of the Cold - Attempts at Life between the Wars" (1994) had not yet been published at the time. It describes a type of person prevalent in anthropology and literature who, without ties, always wide awake and on constant alert, puts on an armor of coldness and distance, wants to appear invulnerable and rejects and excludes everything that makes him vulnerable: above all the world of feelings and expression. In music, this attitude is reflected in neoclassicism and the twelve-tone works of the 1920s, the period immediately after the First World War (Schultz 2005).

Music that feels committed to this "aesthetics of coldness" is somewhere energetically blocked, i.e. the forces in melody, harmony, rhythm and form do not come into flow, cannot unfold freely, do not take the listener into the music, but leave him outside. This creates a distance that is perceived as coolness, as an expression of emotionlessness or frozen feelings. Walter Benjamin spoke of the importance of shocks in connection with Baudelaire, and the instruction "Stop, as if torn off!", which is often found in Ligeti's works, could point to a context of traumatic shocks. In this context, we often find the inability to express feelings, the very coldness that has been typical of modernism since the 1920s.

It may be that dealing with energetically blocked musical structures is unavoidable for a composer who exposes himself to the experiences of the 20th century; it is certainly important as an artistic option, but problematic as a general attitude. Craft in the highest sense as the ability to follow the musical forces in melody, harmony, rhythm and form to where they want to go of their own accord (varying a formulation by Adorno), this attitude of the most active receptivity should be able to transcend the boundaries of an "aesthetics of coldness". In my impression, Ligeti always balanced in the border area - in some works (such as "Melodies", a piece that I still admire very much) he succeeded in his own way in creating music that develops beautifully in a flow.

The opera "Le GrandMacabre" (after Michel de Ghelderode), on the other hand, seems to have been created from the position of the "musicien maudit" - and perhaps failed as a result. Breaking supposed and actual taboos, a pubescent delight in the perverse and infantile, the almost programmatic regression of the time structure to the here and now, all this takes its revenge on the musical level in the disintegration into unrelated individual moments, however "crazy" they may be in themselves, in boredom, which can, however, be played over by the scene, because of course the piece is full-on theater.

Just as the opera provides an example of how an aesthetic position can damage the musical craft, the "Hölderlin-Phantasien" for choir show the opposite of a wonderfully precise and sensitively composed, masterful texture. Every aesthetic question can be translated into a technical one, because aesthetics - often unconsciously and rarely accessible to the composer - contains the secret telos of creation in code, and this wants to be realized by means of the craft. Ghelderode and Hölderlin - these were the poles whose tension Ligeti had to endure, artistically in the tension between the love of the crazy, sensational detail and the intuition of the ideal of a coherent, relational whole encoded in perfect craftsmanship.

V.
In his later years, Ligeti showed increasing admiration for Mozart. Did he himself ever yearn for such wonderfully balanced, perfect music, for music that was perhaps "happy"? The etude, which was then given the title "L'escalier du diable", was originally intended to go in this direction, but then became something "very, very dark" (Dibelius 1994, p. 270). Was it really so decisive that Ligeti had witnessed appalling poverty in California, as he himself said, or had he reached his own aesthetic and technical limits with his project?

Ligeti, like many composers of his generation, was certainly traumatized by the experiences of war, persecution and the loss of his loved ones in the Holocaust (Schultz 2005), and it is admirable how he succeeded in freeing music from its traumatic torpor by turning away from the serial avant-garde and returning it to vitality, imagery and expressiveness. However, he was clearly unable to cross a certain boundary in terms of his proximity to tradition and its layers of meaning, melody and tonality. Even after his retirement from the Musikhochschule, the class occasionally met with him at Manfred Stahnke's studio. On one such occasion, I presented my dance poem "Shiva", a work in which the evolution of consciousness is depicted as the work of the Indian god dancing in the world wheel, and which naturally contains numerous references to various levels of tradition. As is so often the case, the verdict was: "I've heard it all somewhere before!" But when we said goodbye, he squeezed my hand and said: "But I was very impressed by your piece!"

It had often been like that: Appreciation for a well-crafted score was combined with the usually head-shaking question, "But why do you write such old-fashioned music?" Developments can take different directions, and perhaps those who follow one path are not really able to perceive what is new on another. Today, at a great distance and after much reflection on the philosophy of music, I would answer: "Because the aesthetics encoded in the highest concept of craftsmanship are still relevant to me."

Literature:
Walter Benjamin: Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, in: Illuminationen, ausgewählte Schriften, ed. von Siegfried Unseld, Franfurt 1955
Michael Braunfels: Die Krankheit der verwalteten Musik, Zurich 1975
Ulrich Dibelius: György Ligeti - Eine Monographie in Essays, Mainz 1994
Helmut Lethen: Verhaltenslehren der Kälte - Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, Frankfurt 1994
Wolfgang-Andreas Schultz: Avantgarde und Trauma - Die Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts und die Erfahrungen der Weltkriege, in: Lettre International Nr. 71, Berlin 2005