First Published: 30 May 2011
Pages: 352
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series: Eastman Studies in Music


Do today's composers draw inspiration from life experiences or from, say, the natural world?
What influences, past and present, have influenced recent composers?
How essential is it for a composer to develop a personal style, and when does this degenerate into self-repetition?
These are questions about which some of the most important composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century often have quite strong feelings--but have seldom been asked.
In this pathbreaking book, Bálint András Varga puts these three questions to such renowned composers as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Alberto Ginastera, Sofia Gubaidulina, Hans Werner Henze, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, Luigi Nono, Krzysztof Penderecki, Wolfgang Rihm, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Toru Takemitsu, and Iannis Xenakis. Varga's sensitive English renderings capture the subtleties of their sometimes confident, sometimes hesitant, answers.
All statements from English-speaking composers -- such as Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Gunther Schuller, and Sir Michael Tippett -- consist of the composers' own carefully chosen words.
Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers is vital reading for anybody interested in the current state of music and the arts.
The Hungarian music publisher Bálint András Varga has spent nearly forty years working for and with composers. He has published several books, including extensive interviews with Lutoslawski, Berio, and Xenakis. His previous book for the University of Rochester Press is György Kurtág: Three Interviews and Ligeti Homages.


Reviews
The responses vary greatly in length and complexity . . . [but] the variety, together with the lucidity of the responses, makes for a more engaging read. . . . One of the more thought-provoking books on modern music. CLASSICAL MUSIC [Toby Deller]

Invaluable. . . . The responses from . . . Mauricio Kagel, Helmut Lachenmann, and Iannis Xenakis . . . are as lucid an introduction to their musical preoccupations as could be hoped. Through the book, Varga is scrupulous in overall approach -- his introductory paragraphs provide a welcome context. . . . Production values are as consistently high as one expects from the University of Rochester Press. . . . The most illuminating such symposium of composers cast "in their own words." Absorbing and highly pleasurable reading can be assured. GRAMOPHONE [Richard Whitehouse]

Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary music. ON AN OVERGROWN PATH [http://www.overgrownpath.com/2011/06/into-great-noise.html]

In this rich book conceived by Bálint András Varga, eminent composers of different generations converse with each other through their highly distinctive answers to three recurring, probing questions. Each page of this book is haunted by questions of memory-not least, how a composer's specific style develops through time.
-Frank Madlener, general director, IRCAM (Centre Pompidou, Paris)

Typical of Bálint András Varga, the most civilized and intelligent of publishers, to elicit such a multiplicity of responses to three deceptively simple questions. Necessary reading for all who care about the music of our time.
-Sir Simon Rattle, chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonie

This book presents a rich collection of personal statements by our most famous recent composers. Their distinct responses to Varga's three questions offer the reader an insider's view of the ways each composer developed a musical style, situated in the tension between tradition and individual artistic experience. A fascinating compendium of an important chapter in contemporary cultural history.
-Franz Welser-Möst, general music director, Vienna State Opera

Balint Andras Varga is a master at interviewing composers.- MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTES [Peter Laki]