Bartok's apparent weakness, in fact, demonstrated an artistic personality so strong that it could absorb any influence that came its way.
He has a spongelike capacity to absorb a wide array of influences, as suggested in the blog he has kept on the making of "Beginners," which has nods to the performance artist Bas Jan Ader, the photographer William Wegman and the experimental filmmaker Jorgen Leth.
Winter Jazzfest, on Friday and Saturday, focuses on young jazz performers who have absorbed a variety of influences from around the world (see article, Page C1).
So, by the time McDonagh started devouring Pinter's The Birthday Party and JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, he had already absorbed a range of disparate influences that would coalesce into a hybrid dramatic voice, both recognisable and new.
Invaded in name but never conquered in spirit, Sardinia has managed the clever trick of absorbing a cultural buffet of influences while holding its head high with independent pride.
The work absorbs a lot of new influences: African drumming (bouncy irregular stresses within a regular pulse), the player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow (mad machine music) and European folk music revisited (songs and nursery tunes springing out of tonal nowhere and vanishing again).
You absorb your influences in a subtle way because you internalize and then expand on them - making them your own while at the same time engaging in a dialogue with your predecessors.
Ms. Berry-Haseth, 73, revels in Papiamentu's playfulness and capacity to absorb new influences, joking in an interview, for instance, that she was a "puitu killer," or "cradle robber," since she was a few years older than her husband.
As he studied at Harvard and worked as an orchestral clarinettist on the east coast, he was able to absorb influences from a huge variety of sources.
Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, remarks in his preface to the heavyweight volume accompanying the exhibition: "The ability to absorb outside influences without losing a very particular feeling for national identity is one of the most notable attributes of the Russian enameler".
The Cambodian musical culture that spawned the soundtrack of Mr. Pirozzi's film was marvelously fertile, absorbing a wide range of Western influences and infusing them with traditional Khmer themes and singing styles.
