A01=Laszlo Somfai
analytical composing
Author_Laszlo Somfai
autograph manuscripts
Category=AVLA
Category=AVN
compositional process
drafts
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
hungarian folk music
improvisation
intuition
major composers
music
music composer
musical creator
musical theories
notation
oeuvre
performers
piano
published
scholarly work
sketches
theoretical approach
unpublished
western music history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520084858
- Weight: 907g
- Dimensions: 184 x 260mm
- Publication Date: 07 May 1996
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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This long-awaited, authoritative account of Bartok's compositional processes stresses the composer's position as one of the masters of Western music history and avoids a purely theoretical approach or one that emphasizes him as an enthusiast for Hungarian folk music. For Bela Bartok, composition often began with improvisation at the piano. Laszlo Somfai maintains that Bartok composed without preconceived musical theories and refused to teach composition precisely for this reason. He was not an analytical composer but a musical creator for whom intuition played a central role. These conclusions are the result of Somfai's three decades of work with Bartok's oeuvre; of careful analysis of some 3,600 pages of sketches, drafts, and autograph manuscripts; and of the study of documents reflecting the development of Bartok's compositions. Included as well are corrections preserved only on recordings of Bartok's performances of his own works. Somfai also provides the first comprehensive catalog of every known work of Bartok, published and unpublished, and of all extant draft, sketch, and preparatory material.
His book will be basic to all future scholarly work on Bartok and will assist performers in clarifying the problems of Bartok notation. Moreover, it will be a model for future work on other major composers.
Laszlo Somfai is the Director of the Bartok Archives in Budapest and Professor of Musicology at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest. He has published books on Haydn, Bartok, and Webern in German and Hungarian, and an English edition of The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn (1995).
