{"title":"Utopias and Their Discontents: Ligeti's Reception History as Modernist Meta-Narrative","authors":"Amy Bauer","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00004","url":null,"abstract":"Conservative critic John Borstlap cited Ligeti as a partisan in his fight against the modernist myth of progress in the arts, based on the famous citation “I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Ligeti's ambivalence reflected his distaste for art linked to utopian socialist ideals, and for all that was reactionary. Yet he admitted that his own youthful utopian strivings evolved into a desire for complex music that often defied audibility. This essay traces Ligeti's reception history from the late 1950s onward as a reaction to the thwarted utopian strains in his music. For some, Ligeti's music of the 1960s seemed to define “the contemporary problem itself.” But the composer's increased visibility in the 1990s led to demands that he deal with his Jewish heritage and wartime trauma, and cease writing music with a broad appeal. I argue that Ligeti's works reinscribe the past, the personal, and the extramusical as a conscious expression of his prison. They express the nonlinear notion of progress that defines modernism: a vast “tear in the historical process” able to lift music above the scrum of political-aesthetic skirmishes, to a “region which lies elsewhere.”","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139875826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Breughelland”: Subverting the Antinomy of Utopia and Dystopia","authors":"Andreas Dorschel","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00001","url":null,"abstract":"Is György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (1974–1977/1996) a dystopian work, or rather one of utopia? Traditionally, dystopia and utopia have formed an alternative. Yet Ligeti and librettist Michael Meschke enact an intertwinement of dystopia and utopia, in a series of moves and countermoves: (1) Death threatens to eliminate all life. (2) The earth is saved from the fate of the destruction of life – “Death is dead” (II/4). (3) Yet “Breughelland” is and will remain a crude and cruel tyranny. (4) The farcical character of the whole calls into question whether any of the previous moves can be taken seriously. Ligeti's/Meschke's subversion of the antinomy of utopia and dystopia, introduced in the opening “Breughellandlied,” turns out to be in the spirit of Piet the Pot's namesake Pieter Breughel the Elder, as a closer look at his 1567 painting Het Luilekkerland, an inspiration already to de Ghelderode, reveals. The irritating role thus assigned to consumption, however, seems to trivially lose all ambiguity through the words of the opera's final stanza. While this is a weighty objection to the reading proposed here, the conclusion attempts to outline a rejoinder to it.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139683997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Utopias and Their Discontents: Ligeti's Reception History as Modernist Meta-Narrative","authors":"Amy Bauer","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00004","url":null,"abstract":"Conservative critic John Borstlap cited Ligeti as a partisan in his fight against the modernist myth of progress in the arts, based on the famous citation “I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to escape.” Ligeti's ambivalence reflected his distaste for art linked to utopian socialist ideals, and for all that was reactionary. Yet he admitted that his own youthful utopian strivings evolved into a desire for complex music that often defied audibility. This essay traces Ligeti's reception history from the late 1950s onward as a reaction to the thwarted utopian strains in his music. For some, Ligeti's music of the 1960s seemed to define “the contemporary problem itself.” But the composer's increased visibility in the 1990s led to demands that he deal with his Jewish heritage and wartime trauma, and cease writing music with a broad appeal. I argue that Ligeti's works reinscribe the past, the personal, and the extramusical as a conscious expression of his prison. They express the nonlinear notion of progress that defines modernism: a vast “tear in the historical process” able to lift music above the scrum of political-aesthetic skirmishes, to a “region which lies elsewhere.”","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139815803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reports and Conjectures on Kylwiria","authors":"Heidy Zimmermann","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00007","url":null,"abstract":"The code word “Kylwiria” was mentioned by György Ligeti from time to time since the 1970s. At first, it functioned rather abstractly as a working title for the opera that had been in the making since the mid-1960s and eventually mutated into Le Grand Macabre. Later, Ligeti also shared details about the imaginary land of his childhood, providing glimpses of brightly colored maps of that land and underscoring the importance of his childlike fantasy world. This article explores the dimensions of this “private mythology” and its impact on the composer's creative thinking and work. Its documentary evidence – the description of the land of Kylwiria recorded in 1950 in a booklet of more than 70 pages – is presented in examples and examinated for its particularities. On the one hand, it seems that the pioneering exploration of geographical spaces is transferred as a model to the creative exploration of sound spaces. On the other hand, Ligeti's concept of a fantastic counterworld is to be seen in a literary and cultural-historical context, in which it is to be located somewhere between expedition report, travel guide and utopian design. Such an outline sharpens the meaning of Kylwiria as a cipher for creativity in a characteristic mixture of ratio and fantasy.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139880958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sándor Weöres's Poetry as a Catalyst for György Ligeti's Early Development","authors":"Márton Kerékfy","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00012","url":null,"abstract":"Sándor Weöres's poetry was a life-long passion and source of inspiration for György Ligeti. This article explores the role Weöres played in Ligeti's early development as a composer by providing insight into the genesis of all of his 13 early settings of Weöres, including the unpublished choral works Hajnal [Dawn] and Tél [Winter], the incomplete song “Nagypapa leszállt a tóba” [Grandpa descended in the pond], and the unfinished oratorio “Istar pokoljárása” [Ishtar's Journey to Hell], and by making some analytical observations on them. Ligeti's early settings of Weöres were composed in three periods. The first stage in 1946–1947 was his compositional discovery of Weöres's poetry, which seems to have acted as a fuel and a challenge for him, triggering something of a musical self-liberation. His Weöres settings in 1949–1950 may be seen as a sign of solidarity with the poet effectively silenced by Communist state authorities, while in 1952–1955, Weöres texts seem to have served specifically as material for Ligeti's experimentation with static music and serialism.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139882527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sándor Weöres's Poetry as a Catalyst for György Ligeti's Early Development","authors":"Márton Kerékfy","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00012","url":null,"abstract":"Sándor Weöres's poetry was a life-long passion and source of inspiration for György Ligeti. This article explores the role Weöres played in Ligeti's early development as a composer by providing insight into the genesis of all of his 13 early settings of Weöres, including the unpublished choral works Hajnal [Dawn] and Tél [Winter], the incomplete song “Nagypapa leszállt a tóba” [Grandpa descended in the pond], and the unfinished oratorio “Istar pokoljárása” [Ishtar's Journey to Hell], and by making some analytical observations on them. Ligeti's early settings of Weöres were composed in three periods. The first stage in 1946–1947 was his compositional discovery of Weöres's poetry, which seems to have acted as a fuel and a challenge for him, triggering something of a musical self-liberation. His Weöres settings in 1949–1950 may be seen as a sign of solidarity with the poet effectively silenced by Communist state authorities, while in 1952–1955, Weöres texts seem to have served specifically as material for Ligeti's experimentation with static music and serialism.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139822662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Die Natur ist hier … zu Musik geworden”: György Ligeti and (Musical) Nature","authors":"Ewa Schreiber","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00010","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces references to nature and naturalism (understood as an attempt to ground and legitimize art in natural phenomena) in Ligeti's writings, but also in selected aspects of his oeuvre. The references to nature recur here in various manifestations, with romantic depictions of nature appearing alongside more recent, modernist approaches. The concept of nature is associated with the romantic setting for human emotions, with the discovery of scientific laws, with listening to soundscape, with phenomena of auditory perception and with the spectral explorations of sound. Although nature is not a central, strategic concept for Ligeti, it remains a constant, even if hidden, context for his work, a point of reference.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139871843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ligeti and Artistic Research","authors":"Wolfgang Marx","doi":"10.1556/6.2023.00008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2023.00008","url":null,"abstract":"György Ligeti was very interested in many artistic and scientific fields and drew inspiration for his compositional work from them (his engagement with mathematics – particularly fractal geometry and chaos theory – is perhaps the best known). In this chapter I compare the concept of artistic research with Ligeti's practice and oeuvre. While the notion of artistic research was only appearing in embryonic form during the latter stages of Ligeti's career, many – though not all – of his statements seem to be suitable for describing his artistic processes. The benefit of this investigation is expected to be twofold: applying the concept of artistic research to Ligeti's approaches and practices should yield new insights on the relationship between his work and his interest in other humanities and sciences. Yet this look at Ligeti may also help to refine the concept of artistic research as discussed and applied to the artistic output of today.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139873490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"György Cziffra's Life in Hungary (1921–1956)","authors":"Máté Cselényi","doi":"10.1556/6.2022.00008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1556/6.2022.00008","url":null,"abstract":"Georges Cziffra (1921–1994) was one of the outstanding figures of Hungarian and international performing arts in the twentieth century. His adventurous life, career, fate, the virtuosity of his technical skills and his international fame have created a cult of his own, especially in recent years. However, his professional career and general biography have not yet been studied, and little to no literature has been written in the two and a half decades since his death. Thus, the reader/researcher can rely almost exclusively on his autobiography (Cannons and Flowers) and on personal reminiscences and anecdotes, which, as my research has shown, resemble a very limited extent of reality. My aim is to reconstruct and present an objective, fact-based biography in the current study, relying on the material of archives and other institutions and libraries I have collected, as well as on the complete contemporary digitized press material.","PeriodicalId":34943,"journal":{"name":"Studia Musicologica","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46577268","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}