IDENTITY & DIFFERENCE

Jonathan Cross, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Albrecht Wellmer

This volume is a collection of essays based on lectures given at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent at various occasions over the last four years.
Two of our five distinguished authors are British, three are Germans. Two are prominent composers and both keen and provocative writers about music; one is a musicologist and daring critic who specializes in contemporary music. There are also two philosophers and Adorno specialists that deal with such fundamental and highly complex matters as music and language, and music and time.
Quite a mix, you might think, yet I believe it is one with a difference. All authors subscribe to the same seriousness of purpose, so that you may find reminiscences of one text in the others, which, I´m sure, will make for a fascinating read. Moreover, this book is all about the current state of music, about thinking, speaking, and writing about music in the immediate aftermath of that stirring and fascinating twentieth century.
Allow me to thank my co-editors, Frank Agsteribbe, Sylvester Beelaert and Jeroen D´hoe, and all those who, in one way or another, contributed to this book.

One man´s "horrible noise" is another´s "magical breaths".
JONATHAN CROSS

The Buddhist view of reality as lacking inherent existence from its own side is one of the most important insights into the "reality" of music.
JONATHAN HARVEY

Whatever composers cannot speak of they should work on.
HELMUT LACHENMANN

Philosophy and art - so it seems - can only survive together and perish together.
ALBRECHT WELLMER

Time is not everything, even in music. Music rather rebels against it in the name of a present which gathers and concentrates its dimensions within itself.
RICHARD KLEIN

Identity and Difference (Essays on Music, Language and Time) - Jonathan Cross, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann, Albrecht Wellmer, Richard Klein
192 p., ISBN 90 5867 413 4
Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute 5
Verkijgbaar bij: Universitaire Pers