Wednesday, June 18, 2008

No really, I swear...

I swear this is the last thing I will write about people influenced by Bartok, and then I will get back to talking about things I understand (for example).

Gyorgy Ligeti is a phenomenal composer, and as I discovered looking at his wikipedia page, he also was a big fan of Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. In that book, Hofstadter showed that between areas as wide ranging as music, artificial intelligence, computer science, mathematical logic, the works of Lewis Caroll, and the drawings of M.C. Escher, we could find strange loops of self reference and repetition that have profound implications for all of the concerned systems. It's an awesome book that belongs somewhere in everyone's pile, and the fact that it found a home in Legeti's library makes this make so much more sense:

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