"Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland"
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Ligeti’s answer is a prank with a serious aftertaste: when the BBC asks a heavyweight modernist for a “favorite English book,” he dodges the expected prestige canon and picks a children’s hallucination. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-piety. Alice in Wonderland is the perfect decoy because it’s universally legible and quietly radical: a book where logic is a trap, language slips its leash, and authority figures turn absurd the moment you look at them too directly.
The subtext lands neatly on Ligeti’s own aesthetic. His music often behaves like Carroll’s world: pattern is always on the verge of mutating into nonsense, and nonsense reveals a higher-order pattern. The choice signals an allegiance to rule-bending systems rather than nationalist “great books” seriousness. He’s an Eastern European exile in the orbit of British cultural gatekeepers; answering with Carroll is a way of entering Englishness through its most destabilizing export, not its most respectable one.
There’s also a sly critique of the question itself. “Favorite English book” is a small act of cultural branding, a request to certify taste in the right accent. Ligeti refuses to play docent. By invoking Alice, he implies that the most “English” thing might be the tradition of making wit out of power, and making art out of misbehaving logic. The composer’s punchline doubles as a manifesto: wonder beats propriety; paradox beats pedigree.
The subtext lands neatly on Ligeti’s own aesthetic. His music often behaves like Carroll’s world: pattern is always on the verge of mutating into nonsense, and nonsense reveals a higher-order pattern. The choice signals an allegiance to rule-bending systems rather than nationalist “great books” seriousness. He’s an Eastern European exile in the orbit of British cultural gatekeepers; answering with Carroll is a way of entering Englishness through its most destabilizing export, not its most respectable one.
There’s also a sly critique of the question itself. “Favorite English book” is a small act of cultural branding, a request to certify taste in the right accent. Ligeti refuses to play docent. By invoking Alice, he implies that the most “English” thing might be the tradition of making wit out of power, and making art out of misbehaving logic. The composer’s punchline doubles as a manifesto: wonder beats propriety; paradox beats pedigree.
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| Topic | Book |
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