ABSTRACT
To write about a piece of contemporary music relating to musical topics and their performance represents a great challenge, since the interplay of relationships between classic and twenty-first-century topics is a new task, and to find different interpretations of a contemporary work requires considerable effort. To understand Peter Eotvos’s particular emotions when confronted with this tragic event, the authors should mention his general interest – as a composer – in space, in the cosmos and in the evolution of knowledge in astrophysics. He was 17 years old in 1961 when he witnessed the first manned flight into space undertaken by the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Under this stimulus, he wrote, the same year, a piano piece entitled Kosmos, a piece to which he would return several times. Art musics produced outside the European metropolis or the mainstream tradition are often referred to as “nationalisms”.
