Listening in on Composers’ Self-Portraits

Chapter 3 explores the methods by which composers have depicted themselves and their compositional styles in musical self-portraits. It views musical self-portraits in relation to self-portraiture in visual art to identify techniques shared by the two art forms. The chapter focuses in particular on two self-portraits, György Ligeti’s “Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley (und Chopin ist auch dabei),” from Drei Stücke, and Peter Ablinger’s “Quadraturen IV: ‘Selbstportrait mit Berlin.’ ” In their self-portraits, Ligeti and Ablinger reflect on their professional and artistic identities in the context provided by the music and sounds that they hear around them. The study of these musical self-portraits reveals some of the ways recent and contemporary composers view the role of their art and of the sense of hearing in the construction of their own identities.