Alan Rich, whose excellent essay/review collection So I've Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic will be out next week from Amadeus, writes a brief obit of Ligeti, consisting mainly of quotations from an interview Rich conducted with the composer in 1993. This passage is particularly striking: "You know, we have certain drawers. There is a drawer of so-called classical music and jazz is in a different drawer and pop and rock, but there are places where the drawers mix. So I have my love for jazz even I don’t play jazz. When Stravinsky wrote his Piano Rag Music, his ragtime was also very, very deep... In fact I dare to say that the real musical style of the 20th century, the real big thing that happened was jazz, this melding of African rhythmic thinking and English, Irish melodies... more important, I feel, than many of the deep learned music." Also worth reading is Paul Griffiths's 1996 interview with Ligeti, which the critic has posted on his website (click on "Snippet of the Week"). There is tantalizing mention of the Alice opera that was not to be. The Alice books hold nearly as much fascination for composers as do Faust and The Tempest: Unsuk Chin, a formidable composer of vaguely Ligeti-ish tendencies, has written her own Alice, to be heard in Munich next June; Tony Tommasini recently reported on Peter Westergaard's Alice-in-progress; and, of course, there are David Del Tredici's Alice pieces, culminating in the ten-year-old, yet-to-be-performed opera Dum Dee Tweedle.
