The United States and the Soviet Union have loomed large in studies of Cold War Europe. Recent musicological research, however, has started to peer into the shadows, revealing the paths that European musicians pursued between the superpowers’ seemingly opposed aesthetic objectives.Footnote ¹ Rachel Beckles Willson's book contributes to this project by shedding new light on musical life in Hungary. Expanding her previous work on Kurtág, she culls information from printed texts, archival documents, and musical scores.Footnote ² Personal experience informs her analysis. She draws on her own studies in Budapest between 1991 and 1994, as well as the recollections of eyewitnesses to the historical events she describes. She plots a methodological course through this material according to three cardinal points: discourse analysis, sociology, and a concern to account for music as a sensuously present aesthetic experience. The result is almost two books in one – a richly situated chronicle of music-making in twentieth-century Hungary, jostling with a narrative of Ligeti's and Kurtág's work that seeks to shed the social in favour of the transcendent.

Beckles Willson's contribution is important for the way in which it broadens the concept of nationalism to account for displacement and exile. Ligeti's move to the West in 1956, she contends, did not catalyse a sudden metamorphosis. He remained tied to Hungary – and Kurtág. We discover that Ligeti's and Kurtág's fates were curiously intertwined throughout their careers, even if their paths ultimately led in different geographical directions. Each benefited from cultural recalibrations in the 1950s that opened doors to musicians from Hungary's periphery. Both engaged in bouts of soul-searching after 1956, as Ligeti sorted through the wreckage of his Hungarian past and Kurtág purged his former socialist sympathies in the wake of the failed Hungarian revolution. After these moments of personal crisis both avoided words in their music until the mid-1960s when, quite independently, they turned to texts of darkly Christian import. It is as if a single wave of Hungarian composition were refracted through the prism of geopolitical happenstance.

Biographical parallels aside, both composers’ public personas required staking a position vis-à-vis Hungary, and Beckles Willson devotes substantial space to considering how they defined their individual identities. For Ligeti this initially meant navigating an alien world in which he struggled to reconcile his Jewish origins, his nostalgia for a lost past, and his eventual identity as an Austrian citizen. He later cultivated Hungarianness as a sign of difference in the West, while rejecting a simplistically national stance during his homecomings in the 1970s. For Kurtág, constructing a professional identity meant articulating a relationship to the communist Hungarian state. His public image – silent, detached, principled – made him a figure of moral authority in a context where many yearned for an elsewhere unsullied by the compromises of everyday life. Ligeti, Beckles Willson suggests, played the part of émigré, Kurtág the role of artist working in a totalitarian system. We sense again that their careers are two sides of a single coin.

How might national concerns have infiltrated their music? Extrapolating from Zoltán Kodály's idea of a musical mother tongue, Beckles Willson adopts language as an analytical lens. Her categories – language as music, language in music, and ‘music as “language” (darkness and light)’ – at times create strange bedfellows. Yet many of her juxtapositions are revealing. She demonstrates that Kurtág's String Quartet, Op. 1 (1959), and Ligeti's Aventures (1962, rev. 1963) share a common play with human speech patterns, even though they are worlds apart sonically. Ligeti's Requiem (1963–5) and Kurtág's The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza (1963–8) raise related questions about the relationship of music to words. Neither composer could escape Bartók's example, manifested in a characteristic interplay of harmonic polarities. As a concept, language is broad enough to allow Beckles Willson to find sympathetic resonances between these contrasting composers. It also lets her describe their music as ‘Hungarian’ without having to rely on folk song as a litmus test of national identity. Through expanding the notion of what Hungarian music might be, her study contributes admirably to our understanding of nationalism and its potential incarnations in sound.

But this book illuminates not just Ligeti and Kurtág. Beckles Willson's account of Hungarian nationalism has a broader aim: to nuance musicological perceptions of the Cold War by chronicling its ramifications in a local context. She reframes the Cold War in significant ways, not least by starting her narrative in the 1920s. Her approach follows the work of the late Tony Judt, who attributed Cold War strife to tensions that were momentarily repressed in the alliances of World War II and that resurfaced once the war was over.Footnote ³ For Beckles Willson, nationalism is the thread that ties the worlds of Cold War and interwar Budapest together. We learn that musicians in the interwar years struggled to articulate an identity that would be distinct from prevailing European notions of modernity. Kodály found solutions in folk song, while others lauded Bartók's humanism as a socially conscious alternative to Schoenberg's test-tube logic. Thus when we encounter attempts in the late 1940s to preserve something uniquely Hungarian in the face of Soviet influence, we comprehend these efforts at musical self-definition as just the newest phase of an ongoing nationalist project.

Paradoxically, several Hungarian aims dovetailed with Soviet objectives. One of the strengths of Beckles Willson's approach is her willingness to probe the grey areas that emerged from this overlap. Language is again central to her analysis. She suggests that language – and especially its malleability – was a key element of Hungarian responses to Sovietization. The broad outlines of her account will be familiar to students of Eastern Europe, who will recognize the implementation of socialist realism, the formation of a centralized professional union, and the establishment of listening sessions to evaluate composers’ works.Footnote ⁴ Using words to manoeuvre a precarious cultural reality was similarly widespread throughout the Soviet bloc. The fascination of Beckles Willson's account is in its details: she reveals the specific ways in which Hungarian musicians paid lip service to socialist ideology as they sought to annex its institutional models to serve their own ends. Kodály, for example, shrewdly manipulated his public remarks in the early 1950s to imply fidelity to the Soviet aesthetic platform. Long a proponent of accessibility and music education, he emerges as a not unwilling accessory to his co-optation by Hungarian communists – as long as this co-optation gained him a degree of creative autonomy and institutional support for his professional goals.

The mix of language and politics was similarly ambiguous during listening sessions at the Hungarian Musicians’ Union. Although these meetings can be viewed as little more than occasions for ritual display, Beckles Willson suggests that they may have gone beyond empty theatricality to get under a young composer's skin. As evidence she cites Ligeti's disparaging remarks on his Romanian Concerto, performed at a listening session in 1951. Was he just going through the motions? Or had the rite of self-abnegation become something more: an opportunity for personal growth? Beckles Willson leaves these questions unresolved, suspended between the competing factors of political repression and individual agency. By allowing for both possibilities, she represents her historical subjects as more than cogs in an ideological machine, and therefore suggests a nuanced alternative to top-down models of totalitarian power.Footnote ⁵

Beckles Willson is just as keen to let sounds have their say, and it is here that her study swerves into more questionable territory. Her point of departure is a notion of presence articulated by Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Jean-Luc Nancy. In the sense of ‘becoming present’ (or absent) this idea performs substantial work, allowing Beckles Willson to account for elements of Ligeti's and Kurtág's music that are not always well served by familiar pitch-centred methods of post-tonal analysis. In Ligeti's textural compositions of the 1960s, for example, she sees moments of accumulation and dispersal as evoking the interplay of presence and absence. Though more disembodied, Kurtág's works can also be felt as enacting instances of opening and closing. Like language, then, presence gives Beckles Willson a common vocabulary for exploring the very different effects of Ligeti's and Kurtág's music.

She aims, however, at a more polemical target: musicological efforts to contextualize sounds within their surroundings, especially if these surroundings are political. The anti-hermeneutic nature of Gumbrecht's and Nancy's thought underpins her offensive against ‘current scholarly suspicion of the aesthetic sphere’ (5). Gumbrecht – who has criticized musicologists’ rush to interpret music – seeks to recalibrate the humanities’ near-exclusive focus on meaning by highlighting moments of presence, in which knowledge emerges through transcendent revelation and objects are not represented but ‘made present again’.Footnote ⁶ Nancy also privileges instances that are fundamentally ungraspable, such as birth, death, or an outburst of laughter. As an eruption of sound that suddenly appears and then vanishes, laughter resists representation and interpretation. ‘Let's not make too much of it’, Nancy says.Footnote ⁷

And, Beckles Willson implies, let's not make too much of music either – not if this means freighting works with uncontestable, singular meanings. Beckles Willson is rightly wary of readings that would interpret musical works primarily as alternative documents of political history, a fate that has, to a disproportionate extent, befallen compositions penned in twentieth-century Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁸ She points instead to the ‘sonorous intransigence that is music’ (8), that is, to aspects of music that resist attempts to pin them down. She casts Ligeti's and Kurtág's compositions as fundamentally devoid of concepts in the moment of their apprehension, preferring instead to let the sounds, in Nancy's words, ‘present-lose’ themselves. The implication is that there is something about music that remains solely aesthetic, even (or especially) in a context that sought to politicize all aspects of artistic production.

Beckles Willson's account of Kurtág's Games (Játékok, 1973–) demonstrates how she wields this opposition in analytical practice. A series of brief piano works meant to inspire young players’ curiosity, the Games give performer and analyst little to go on – the ghost of a waltz rhythm here, the slow unfurling of a glissando there. Their Bartókian overtones, however, were enough to catapult Kurtág to canonical status when Games was first performed in 1975. When Kurtág himself took to the stage in 1979, assisted by his wife Márta, the evanescent miniatures stunned critics into silence. They were left dumbstruck by powerful contextual forces, not the least of which was Kurtág's carefully crafted public persona. Yet, Beckles Willson contends, ‘it would be impoverishing to stay with sociology alone at this point’ (151). In a move to decouple the pieces from Kurtág's person, she argues that the impact of the 1979 performance may have resulted as much from the music as from the famously reticent composer's rare public appearance. She works by analogy to argue her case further. Characterizing Games as a collection of found objects, she compares the piano pieces to the similarly evocative, transient poems of Desző Tandori's 1973 volume The Cleaning of an Objet Trouvé and suggests that both the verses and the sounds evoke something of the fragility of life in the face of death. Or, to put it another way, Kurtág's and Tandori's works enact a series of moments of presence that are as intense as they are ephemeral. This, she suggests, is what overwhelmed Kurtág's audience that evening in 1979 – not just the politically inflected circumstances of Games's performance.

A sceptical reader might ask, however, if the aesthetic and political realms can be sundered so neatly. She might also ask whether Beckles Willson is using ‘presence’ to reintroduce formalism through the back door. For what Beckles Willson identifies as ‘suspicion of the aesthetic sphere’ (5) might more accurately be called a wariness of that notion of the ‘music itself’ which scholars of the Cold War in particular have done much to discredit. Teasing out connections between music and its sociopolitical contexts has been fundamental to Cold War studies since their inception, and it remains a common theoretical concern. In a seminal article Martin Brody revealed the worldly influences that drove Milton Babbitt to develop an ostensibly objective music-theoretical language.Footnote ⁹ In her study of post-war serialism Anne Shreffler has attempted to show how music might intersect with politics on the level of individual works, a process she likens to ‘trying to identify the effect of global weather patterns on the begonia in your garden’.Footnote ¹⁰ The difficulty of linking music to politics does not mean that scholars should be content to view one as separable from the other. Shreffler instead proposes that musicologists acknowledge both as forms of human activity. It is people that connect music and politics. In contrast, Beckles Willson's appeal to pure aesthetics threatens to take people out of the picture altogether.

This move is all the more surprising since her own evidence suggests that aesthetics and politics are intertwined, not disconnected. She grounds Ligeti's claim that music occupies both the social world and a realm apart, noting that ‘one cannot entirely detach this resoluteness from the years Ligeti spent in a regime where music's alleged “meanings” and political programmes were discussed with so much dogma and so little sophistication’ (8). She reveals that the Hungarian government permitted notions of artistic autonomy to flourish that were predicated, ironically, on music's unsuitability for political use. In the absence of socialist content, that is, the régime preferred music that ostensibly conveyed no political message at all to sounds that were overtly subversive.

No less than Ligeti's aesthetics, Kurtág's transcendence was also not a self-evident fact: it was entangled in the very social conditions his music was thought to evade. Beckles Willson shows how Hungarian critics invested increasingly in the idea that Kurtág occupied an independent aesthetic realm, a position they championed against competing politicized interpretations of his music. For example, when Kurtág set Russian texts in Omaggio a Luigi Nono, Op. 16 (1979), critic György Kroó heard the work as confirming the composer's otherworldly status, not as referring to a locus of oppressive power. We might view Kroó's position, Beckles Willson says, as loyal, ‘for it sympathetically elaborated on Kurtág's own projected understanding of what he was doing’ (202). Other commentators, albeit a minority, saw Kurtág's use of Russian-language texts in the work and its dedication to Nono as roadblocks to an apolitical understanding of the piece: aesthetician István Balázs read Omaggio as a critical meditation on state socialism, an interpretation Beckles Willson calls ‘utopian’ (205).

Beckles Willson further suggests that Kurtág's works from the 1980s had much to do with their historical moment. For instance, she intimates that Kurtág in his Kafka Fragments, Op. 24 (1985–7), was as concerned with truth, purity, and ethical action as were such writers as Péter Nádas and Václav Havel, who conceptualized Central Europe as a moral realm in which the exercise of official political power was incompatible with inner integrity.Footnote ¹¹ Yet even here she is reluctant to let Kurtág exist too much in the world. She stresses that whatever its resonance with politicized conceptions of Central Europe, Kafka Fragments occupies ‘the explicitly aesthetic sphere of the “kingdom of the spirit”’ (214). It is at moments like these that the book's disjunctions are felt most keenly. Although elsewhere she analyses the ‘Kurtág myth’ as a vital component of the composer's reception, here Beckles Willson aligns herself with Kurtág's loyalist critics, hinting that there really is something about his music that eludes capture. At such moments she ceases to examine the Kurtág myths and instead perpetuates them – a polemical stance at odds with the subtle insights encountered throughout the remainder of the book.

Is music diminished by its contexts? Only if one still subscribes to romanticized notions of artistic transcendence. Beckles Willson's book is at its best when she writes about music and context together, rather than privileging one at the expense of the other. Nevertheless, that she foregrounds some of the tensions inherent in writing about aesthetics and politics is a strength, not a failing. Such tensions are inevitable when writing about music composed during the Cold War, an era that continues to elicit strong emotional responses from those who experienced it at first hand. As a result, Beckles Willson's study is valuable not only for the information it provides but also for the methodological questions it raises. This thought-provoking book deserves to be widely read, and it is sure to spark lively debate about music and power, nationalism, and how scholars approach a period that, for many, remains within living memory.