Bernhard Lang

'This perceptive volume offers the first sustained, book-length treatment of Bernhard Lang that manages to be at once accessible and intellectually ambitious... Dysers’s prose is an exemplar of scholarly clarity: she avoids needless obscurantism while still conducting a theoretically informed inquiry. Her interdisciplinary horizon, which crosses philosophy, theatre studies, and political aesthetics, is not artificial but functional; it helps make Lang’s music intelligible on its own terms. Equally important, the work fills a genuine gap in contemporary musicology: Lang has been comparatively overlooked in English-language scholarship, and Dysers’s volume should act as a corrective and as an invitation to further research. This book will be of value to a diverse readership: composers and performers interested in process-based composition, and musicologists who wish to expand the analytic toolbox for contemporary repertories. Dysers gives us an interpretative vocabulary that will make listening to Lang’s music richer and more exacting. The book is a model of how to write about a living composer without resorting to hagiography, and it should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the aesthetics, philosophy, and method behind one of Europe’s most inventive contemporary composers.'

-- Riccardo Wanke, Music and Letters

'Dysers explores the concept of repetition, insightfully examining Lang's use of textual quotation, and his practice of musical borrowing. She argues that while repetition is commonly treated as reiteration of a previously explored idea, this is too reductive. She treats it more as radical instability. [...] The book is indebted to music theory, psychology and post-structuralist philosophy, and Dysers has engaged in extended interviews with the composer.'

-- Andy Hamilton, The