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twentieth-century music 1/1, 5–28 © 2004 Cambridge University PressDOI: 10.1017/S1478572204000040 Printed in the United Kingdom

György Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy

CHARLES WILSON

AbstractComposers’ self-representations – in articles, programme notes, and interviews – have exerted a significantinfluence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also widerhistoriographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through thepublished statements of György Ligeti – a ‘rhetoric of autonomy’, which tends to disavow allegiances to ‘schools’ orinstitutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type ofrhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities ofindividuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigmthat much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ‘ideology of the unique self’ (Jameson), hasleft largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longeraccomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image ofthe radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapablycaught up in its mechanisms as an explicitly promotional tool.

Morton Feldman once said of composers that ‘all I could wish them in life is to be lonely’.1

And going by their public statements over the course of the twentieth century, that wish

would seem to have been granted. Declarations of creative isolation were always the stock-

in-trade of the modernist tradition, whether morbidly self-pitying in tone (‘How One

Becomes Lonely’) or defiantly triumphalist (‘Who Cares if You Listen?)’.2 And still

independence and radical autonomy remain central elements in many composers’ self-

representations, even if they tend nowadays to be less broodingly self-indulgent or stridently

polemical. But an artist is, of course, never truly alone. The writing of, among others, George

Dickie, Pierre Bourdieu, Howard Becker, and Janet Wolff has stressed the situatedness of

even the most seemingly hermetic and socially isolated creators within an ‘artworld’ or ‘field’

of cultural production.3 Artworks, however innovative and ‘independent’, inevitably take

shape against the background of shared conventions (whether these are tacitly accepted or

deliberately transgressed) and offer ‘solutions’ to communally acknowledged ‘problems’,

thus articulating a potential space for their own reception and pre-empting to some extent

Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Second Biennial Conference on Twentieth-Century Music (GoldsmithsCollege London, 29 June 2001), and at research seminars at the University of Surrey (5 February 2002) and the Universityof Durham (19 March 2003).

1 Morton Feldman, Essays, 244.2 Schoenberg, ‘How One Becomes Lonely’; Babbitt, ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’.3 See Dickie, The Art Circle; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production; Becker, Art Worlds; Wolff, The Social Production

of Art.

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the responses of other artworld members.4 By drawing attention to such processes, recent

cultural criticism has gone a long way towards challenging the familiar Romantic image of

the autonomous artist – the myth of the ‘uncreated creator’, floating free of social or

institutional allegiances.5 And yet this myth has proved hard to dislodge, especially – and

perhaps surprisingly – when it comes to considerations of contemporary creativity.

I shall argue here that composers’ public statements, through the uniquely authoritative

status accorded them by scholars, have played an essential role in propping up this image of

the heroically independent creator. Artistic self-representations – in articles, programme

notes, and especially interviews – are naturally individualistic, for reasons that go beyond

mere egocentricity. The ‘rhetoric of autonomy’ has served an especially important function

for writers and artists ever since the advent of what Felicity Nussbaum has called ‘the

published self as property in a market economy’6 – the function, namely, of differentiating

them from other creators and proclaiming the uniqueness of their work in a competitive

market of symbolic goods. As such, composers’ self-representations often serve a function

that is as much performative as constative. They are ‘position takings’, to use Bourdieu’s

expression,7 and their assimilation by scholars as straightforward claims to truth often

bespeaks a fundamental category mistake. But their unquestioned acceptance also has wider

implications for the historiography of late twentieth-century music. For the resultant image

of innumerable ‘isolated’ and ‘autonomous’ creators both legitimates and is legitimated by

the still widespread ‘pluralist’ paradigm of contemporary culture. Whether the pluralist

model is viewed in utopian terms as a joyous celebration of unbridled diversity, or rather less

positively as a fractured universe of radically incommensurable private codes and languages,

there are reasons why it requires careful scrutiny. Firstly, its talk of openness and tolerance

seems powerless to eradicate the inequalities and politics of exclusion that continue to

characterize artworlds of all kinds. Secondly, its tendency to present contemporary culture as

a summation of the polarized activities of individuals devalues the infrastructures, insti-

tutions, and informal subcultural collectives that help to sustain rare and marginal forms of

creativity. The ultimate irony is that the rhetoric of autonomy, while helping to sustain a

postmodern pluralist ideology, at the same time loses under postmodernism many of its

former critical and radical implications. The defiant declarations of Romantic and modernist

artists once represented a powerful assertion of their right to self-determination, their desire

to be answerable to the ‘laws of art’ rather than the dictates of the mass market. But in a

cultural sphere increasingly subject to direct commercial pressures, the image of the ‘artist as

individual’ becomes a valuable promotional tool to that market, co-optable by the very forces

it once set out to resist. This will be evident especially in the case study under scrutiny here,

that of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

4 As Dickie comments, ‘although an artist can withdraw from contact with the various institutions of art, he cannotwithdraw from the institution of art because he carries it with him as Robinson Crusoe carried his Englishness with himthroughout his stay on the island’ (italics original); Dickie, The Art Circle, 49–50. Or, to put it more loosely, you cantake the artist out of the institution, but you cannot take the institution out of the artist.

5 See Bourdieu, ‘The Philosophical Institution’, 4; also ‘But Who Created the ‘‘Creators’’?’ (1980), 139–42.6 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, xiv.7 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 30.

6 Wilson Gyorgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy

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I

No duality, no synthesis, no analysis. I hate all these pseudo-philosophical over-

simplifications. I hate all ideologies. I have certain musical imaginations and

ideas. I don’t write music naïvely. But I imagine music as it sounds, very con-

cretely. . . . And I never think in philosophical terms, or never in extra-musical

terms. . . . [W]hat I am doing now is neither ‘modern’ nor ‘postmodern’ but

something else . . .. I don’t want to go back to tonality or to expressionism or all

the ‘neo’ and retrograde movements which exist everywhere. I wanted to find my

own way and I finally found it. I don’t do ‘static’ music any more . . . no. I have

found certain complex possibilities in rhythm and new possibilities in harmony

which are neither tonal nor atonal.8

What I actually compose is difficult to categorize: it is neither ‘avant-garde’ nor

‘traditional’, neither tonal nor atonal. And in no way post-modern, as the ironic

theatricalizing of the past is quite foreign to me.9

In these two extracts, the first from an interview of 1986, the second from a liner note to a

recording issued almost a decade later, György Ligeti outlines his artistic position with a

seemingly endless chain of refusals: ‘neither ‘‘modern’’ nor ‘‘postmodern’’ ’, ‘neither tonal

nor atonal’, ‘neither ‘‘avant-garde’’ nor ‘‘traditional’’ ’; and, we infer, neither expressionist

nor ‘neo-’, neither naïve nor ideological. Other writings and interviews offer variants of the

‘neither–nor’ formula: ‘my independence from both X and non-X’10 or ‘I detest/am against

both X and non-X’.11 One recalls immediately the ‘neither–norism’ parodied by Roland

Barthes, that species of critical – or, rather, all too uncritical – discourse aimed at avoiding

any explicit ideological commitment. Barthes spoke of his ‘neither–nor critics’ as ‘invariably

the adepts of a bi-partite universe where they would represent divine transcendence’.12 And

transcendence is, on the face of it, the implication here, Ligeti appearing simply to elude those

mundane designations which oppress the hapless majority of other composers. With his

‘neither–nor’ litany, he seems to set himself apart from his colleagues, implying that their

struggles are not his. By ranging real or imagined adversaries on either side, maximizing the

differences between and minimizing those within his opposed camps, he offers himself as the

exception who proves the rule.

Such a desire to resist categorization is only natural. Most of us, in Western liberal society

at least, would rather be seen as individuals in our own right than as merely one of a species.

As Bourdieu has noted, the word ‘categorize’ comes from the Greek word kategorein, ‘to

accuse in public’; hence, perhaps, it is unsurprising when interview subjects flinch from any

8 Dufallo, ‘György Ligeti’, 334–5.9 Ligeti, liner notes to György Ligeti Edition 3, 11–12.

10 ‘With the Piano Concerto I offer my aesthetic credo: my independence both from the criteria of the traditionalavant-garde and from those of fashionable postmodernism’; Ligeti, ‘On My Piano Concerto’, 13.

11 ‘I detest absolutely geometrical precision and complete openness. I want a certain order, but an order that is a littledisordered. I detest absolute geometry and absolute chaos’; Michel, ‘Entretiens avec György Ligeti’, in György Ligeti:compositeur d’aujourd’hui, 200.

12 Barthes, ‘Neither–Nor Criticism’ (1957), 83.

Wilson Gyorgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy 7



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kind of label – whether Marxist, serialist or postmodernist – and declare their own work

‘difficult to categorize’.13 There is therefore no reason to regard Ligeti’s statements as

especially surprising or remarkable. More striking, perhaps, is the ease with which Ligeti’s

rhetorical manners infiltrate the prose of his commentators. Alastair Williams, for instance,

speaks of Ligeti’s music as ‘located neither inside nor outside the high modernist frame’ and

‘embrac[ing] the extremes of neither determinacy nor indeterminacy’.14 Also frequently

encountered is that characteristic marker of transcendence: ‘beyond’. Ligeti is ‘an outsider

beyond the established tenets’,15 whose works belong in a realm ‘beyond the canons of

style’.16 Constantin Floros, echoing Ligeti statements of the kind cited above, entitled his

monograph of 1996 György Ligeti: Beyond Modernism and Postmodernism.17 Even the phrase

‘I have always been the same man’, with which Ligeti so often asserts his underlying con-

sistency amid the vicissitudes of changing fashions, is echoed, with not a quotation mark in

sight, in the concluding sentence of the article on the composer in the second edition of The

New Grove.18

Some, of course, might protest that formulations of the ‘neither–nor’ or ‘beyond X and

non-X’ variety are simply the best we can do to encapsulate the elusive nature of Ligeti’s

creative persona. But others might see it differently. This style of position-taking has, after all,

some distinguished precedents. Bourdieu introduces an example in the context of his

discussion of the literary field in the early nineteenth century, a time when a new generation

of artists, operating outside aristocratic patronage, found themselves forced to choose

between adapting to the demands of the new mass middle-class market and upholding the

virtues of ‘difficult’ writing, mindful of its almost certain public rejection and commercial

failure. As Bourdieu points out, those who chose the latter path, that of ‘art-for-art’s-sake’,

refused both the conservatism of bourgeois art and the vulgarity of the new and fast-

expanding literary proletariat, the young bohemians. In this context he cites a letter of

Gustave Flaubert in which the novelist rails against his new-found status of leader of the

realist school after the success of Madame Bovary: ‘Everyone thinks that I am in love with

realism, whereas I execrate it . . . But I loathe just as much false idealism’.19 What we read in

this double refusal – ‘neither realism nor false idealism’ – is, Bourdieu suggests, simply the

rhetorical manifestation of the very practical need of artists to make their mark in the new

literary economy, to assert their difference from other producers and create a new and

distinctive position in relation to those already occupied. ‘To exist is to differ’, in other

13 See Bourdieu, In Other Words, 27.14 Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity, 81.15 Bossin, ‘György Ligeti’s New Lyricism’, 239.16 Thomas, ‘New Times, New Clocks’, 379.17 Floros, György Ligeti.18 ‘In terms of inquisitive, fundamental-seeking, exploratory process . . . and of reaction (usually surprising and

contradictory) to the world around him, he has always been the same man’; Griffiths, ‘Ligeti, György’, 694. For thephrase ‘Ich bin immer derselber Mensch’, and slight variants on it, see Lobanova, ‘ ‘‘Ich sehe keinen Widerspruchzwischen Tradition und Modernität!’’ ’, 14; Lichtenfeld, ‘Gespräch mit György Ligeti’, 8; Gojowy, ‘György Ligeti übereigene Werke’, 353; Wiesmann, ‘ ‘‘The Island is Full of Noise’’ ’, 510; Dibelius, ‘Gespräch über Ästhetik’, 268.

19 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 200.




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words;20 and widespread recognition of this coincided, not fortuitously, with the birth of

copyright, a form of ownership dependent on evidence of a work’s originality, which thus

heightened the urgency of ‘producing belief ’ in the rarity and uniqueness of both the works

themselves and the creative persona who authored them. Hence the efficacy of the double

refusal: with it the artist rejects ‘any mark, any distinctive sign, that could mean support, or,

worse, membership’, instead laying claim to a new, ‘sovereign position which proclaims

itself free of any determination’.21 Given the way Ligeti’s double refusals perpetuate those

strategies of differentiation so characteristic of the artistic and class struggles of the early 19th

century, it is perhaps telling that he once portrayed his own position as a double rejection of

the bourgeois and the bohemian: ‘There are official composers who dress up in a dinner suit

and bohemian ones who wear jeans. I do not wear either.’22

The nature of these statements as performative rhetoric soon reveals itself when Ligeti’s

relationship with these disavowed categories is probed in more detail. In 1993 he explained to

Ulrich Dibelius his position within what he called the ‘great divide’ between the ‘further

development of the avant-garde’ on the one hand and the ‘modal-tonal realm’ on the other.

Ranged under the latter rubric are such diverse figures as Steve Reich, Henryk Górecki, Arvo

Pärt, and John Adams.23 If Ligeti seems to smooth over the stylistic and aesthetic distinctions

between the work of these four composers – Dibelius expresses his astonishment that he can

mention them ‘in the same breath’ – he presents the avant garde in still more monolithic

terms. While he admits to having for a time ‘accepted the Cologne–Darmstadt avant garde’,

generously acknowledging personal debts to figures such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and

Gottfried Michael Koenig, he still demonizes the group as a whole as ‘this conspiracy, this

clique, this mafia . . . a very closed society’.24 Such totalitarian images are taken up if anything

more forcefully by commentators: Paul Griffiths, in the introductory paragraph to his New

Grove article, makes almost luridly explicit the connection between dictatorships ‘brown’,

‘red’, and ‘serial’, commenting on how, ‘after being exposed to two tyrannies in his youth . . .

he found himself, in western Europe, confronted by another stern ideology, that of the

Darmstadt–Cologne avant garde’.25

Ligeti does not always portray his relationship with the Cologne circle in such an

altogether negative light. Elsewhere he writes of the studio as a ‘paradise’, whose environ-

ment he ‘soaked up . . . like a sponge’:26 it ‘rescued me from isolation’, he tells another

interviewer.27 Yet his commentators, with few exceptions, continue to present him (pursuing

the totalitarian analogy) as a ‘dissident’, an outsider to the avant garde. In support of this they

cite a number of points: his early ‘heroic’ rejection of serialism; his development of a

20 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 58.21 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 169, 174.22 Ligeti in Conversation, 51–2. The image of the composer as gauche social misfit again crops up in an interview of 1981,

where Ligeti says of the Piano Concerto (then at the start of its long gestation) that ‘the music’s tie is badly done up’;Lichtenfeld, ‘Musik mit schlecht gebundener Krawatte’, 472.

23 Dibelius, ‘Gespräch über Ästhetik’, 263, 268.24 Dibelius, ‘Gespräch über Ästhetik’, 273, 253.25 Griffiths, ‘Ligeti’, 690.26 Ligeti, liner notes to György Ligeti Edition 4, 12.27 Lobanova, ‘ ‘‘Ich sehe keinen Widerspruch’’ ’, 12.




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distinctive style of orchestral writing involving dense chromatic clusters; and finally his

calculated reintegration of harmony (including formerly ‘forbidden’ consonances, such as

octaves) and melody. Yet in each of these instances Ligeti was acting not outside the

avant-garde tradition at all but very much in the spirit of its evolution, responding to what

were evidently perceived as communal problems by a variety of composers. Where Ligeti’s

engagement with serialism is concerned, Rudolf Frisius comments on how writers tend to

imply that ‘only Ligeti correctly judged the state of serial development at the end of the 1950s,

namely as the arrival at the end of a blind alley, from which it was now essential to find the

way out’.28 This notion of Ligeti’s almost single-handed triumph over serialism is offered by

Constantin Floros, who explains how the ‘consequences’ Ligeti drew from a

minutely detailed study of many scores . . . led to the surmounting of serial music,

for his approach gave rise to imitations of various kinds. So the sixties became the

decade of postserial music and even today it can be said that Ligeti’s overcoming

of serialism constitutes a historic act.29

But Ligeti was by no means the only, let alone the first, composer-commentator to

question the premises of serial composition: and, in the measure that he did so, he was

contributing to a debate that was already well underway. His critique of Boulez’s Structure 1a

in the journal Die Reihe is often cited as a devastating exposé of the self-defeating nature of

‘current’ serial practice.30 But it tends to be forgotten that the work was by then some seven

years old, Boulez having extensively overhauled his procedures in the light of his own

published critique of the work, aspects of which Ligeti’s article inevitably echoes.31 Likewise,

in his other well-known contribution to Die Reihe, ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, Ligeti

is frequently portrayed as taking up an anti-serial position. But while the article voices

eloquently the contradictions and paradoxes at the heart of late-1950s serial practice, these

contradictions were hardly lost on his contemporaries, as Ligeti’s copious footnote refer-

ences to the theoretical writings of Herbert Eimert, Henri Pousseur, and Stockhausen

testify.32 Even one of Ligeti’s most apparently ‘sceptical’ points – concerning the ‘erosion of

any intervallic profile’ in more complex types of serial process33 – had been made in strikingly

similar terms by Stockhausen in his lecture ‘Musik im Raum’, presented at Darmstadt in

summer 1958 (hence a few months before Ligeti penned his article) and published in an

earlier issue of Die Reihe.34 Stockhausen’s theorization of ‘group’ and ‘mass’ composition,

which had taken shape in a series of texts over the previous five years, had clearly influenced

28 Frisius, ‘Personalstil und Musiksprache’, 190–91.29 Floros, ‘Hommage a György Ligeti’, 25.30 Ligeti, ‘Decision and Automatism in Structure 1a’, 36–62.31 Boulez’s self-critique was first published as ‘Eventuellement . . .’, 117–48; translated as ‘Possibly . . .’, 111–40. For a

cogent critique of the accuracy and ‘objectivity’ of Ligeti’s analysis, see Piencikowski, ‘Inschriften’.32 Ligeti, ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, 5–19.33 Ligeti, ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’, 7.34 ‘At present . . . intervals – which for Webern still represented the fundamental element of composition – play only a

modest part . . . in those works which are based on the concept of tone-structure . . .. [T]he hierarchy of intervals isdissolved by composition’; Stockhausen, ‘Music in Space’, 79–80.




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not only Ligeti’s article but also his first orchestral works completed in the West.35 Carefully

proportioned sections based on calculated intervallic ‘bandwidths’ – a characteristic struc-

tural feature of Gruppen, which Stockhausen was completing when Ligeti was staying at the

composer’s flat in 1957 – also provide the basis of Ligeti’s own Apparitions (1958–9) and

Atmosphères (1961). Such works should therefore be seen as part of an evolution within the

serial tradition and a response to problems articulated within it, rather than as a break from

that tradition altogether. In the same way, Ligeti’s ‘abandonment of harmonic neutrality’36

and subsequent restoration of ‘melodic shape, that forbidden fruit of modern music’37 in his

works of the late 1960s and early 70s could hardly have been carried out in ignorance of the

similar preoccupations of such colleagues as Pousseur, Luciano Berio, and Stockhausen

during this period. Again Ligeti offered his own solutions – the approach to harmony in

Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) lacks the wide-ranging inclusivity evident in Pousseur’s Votre Faust

(1960–68), just as there is a world of difference between the ‘Mantra’ of Stockhausen’s

eponymous work (1969–70) and the ‘Melodien’ of Ligeti’s (1971). But such contemporary

examples, and the theoretical discussions that ran alongside them (such as Pousseur’s

wide-ranging ‘essai sur la question harmonique’ of 1968),38 demonstrate that the rehabili-

tation of consonance, harmony, and melody formed part of a communal agenda. Ligeti’s

‘solutions’, however innovative and resourceful, were shaped in response to issues that were

more than merely personal.

If Ligeti’s ‘distance’ from the avant garde has been somewhat overstated, then he is not

alone. Writers on most of the leading Darmstadt- and Cologne-affiliated composers of this

period have been equally keen to distance ‘their man’ from a putatively monolithic avant

garde. One can read elsewhere, for instance, that Bruno Maderna’s ‘dialectic of rigour and

fancy set him apart from his avant-garde colleagues’,39 that Luigi Nono was ‘never content to

play with numbers and structures in the orthodox Darmstadt manner’,40 and that Berio

‘maintained a canny distance from the aesthetic and technical debates that typified the

[Darmstadt] summer schools’.41 Breaking rank with the ‘school’ is, after all, a time-honoured

strategy on the part of artists deemed to have reached creative maturity. The group or school,

as Bourdieu has pointed out, serves its essential function at the start of an artist’s career,

allowing those who would struggle to make their mark as individuals to do so collectively

instead.42 But once that recognition has been achieved – first for the group, then for its

members – the newly established individuals feel at liberty to detach themselves from the

35 See, for instance, ‘Weberns Konzert für 9 Instrumente Op. 24: Analyse des ersten Satzes’ (1953), ‘Von Webern zuDebussy: Bemerkungen zur statistischen Form’ (1954), and ‘Gruppenkomposition: Klavierstück I (Anleitung zumHören)’ (1955); all reprinted in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte: Band I.

36 Ligeti in Conversation, 126.37 Ligeti in Conversation, 137.38 Pousseur, ‘L’apothéose de Rameau’, 105–72.39 Dalmonte, ‘Maderna, Bruno’, 534.40 Gorodecki, ‘Luigi Nono: a History of Belief ’, 10–17.41 Osmond-Smith, ‘Berio, Luciano’, 351. One might question whether there was such a thing as an ‘orthodox

Darmstadt manner’, or whether that demonic ‘other’ was simply a construction of these and similar differen-tiating strategies. For a distinctly sceptical line on the ‘Darmstadt conspiracy’, see Boehmer, ‘The Sanctificationof Misapprehension into a Doctrine’, 43–7.

42 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 60–61, 106–7.




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group identity. (And the need for such detachment will naturally seem all the more urgent

when – as in the case of Darmstadt – the name of the ‘school’ has become a journalistic

epithet for epigonism and academicism.) What is often read as part of Ligeti’s unique artistic

make-up – his ‘distance’ from the avant-garde – needs, therefore, to be understood in

relation to the often strikingly similar position-takings of his contemporaries.

Ligeti’s apparent rejection of postmodernism appears to stem from similar distancing

motives. Indeed a number of writers have seen rather distinct parallels between Ligeti’s work

and postmodernist concepts in the visual arts and architecture.43 And in his more detailed

self-appraisals, Ligeti voices some ambiguity on this issue. In one interview, having dismissed

postmodernism as an ‘eclectic play with elements from the past, such as tonality, in all too

easy ingratiating ways’, he describes his Horn Trio (1982) as a ‘typical postmodern piece’.44

Later, however, he changed his mind, claiming that the work’s ‘odd angles and trick floors’

completely ‘rule out any ‘‘postmodern’’ compositional conception’.45 Ligeti’s uncertainty

may to some extent reflect the confusion surrounding the use of the term ‘postmodern’ in

German debates at the time. Joakim Tillman explains how postmodernism was initially

equated by some with the explicitly conservative and restorative agenda of composers

associated with the so-called Neue Einfachheit, including a number of Ligeti’s former

students, such as Georg von Dadelsen, Detlev Müller-Siemens, and Hans-Jürgen von Bose.46

Ligeti’s apparent hostility to postmodernism may therefore have much to do with his desire

to differentiate his own direction at the start of the 1980s from that being taken by the

younger generation.47 Still it is doubtful that a work like the Horn Trio, with its avowed

homages to Brahms and (more directly) Beethoven, could have been composed without the

challenges posed by these new ‘postmodern’ tendencies. Ligeti acknowledges as much in

respect of the two harpsichord pieces Passacaglia ungherese and Hungarian Rock (both 1978)

– the last works he completed before the four-year silence that preceded the Trio – which he

described as ‘ironic comments in the discussion with my students, among whom the

postmodern direction was very pronounced’.48 (The ‘Bulgarian’ ostinato of Hungarian Rock

was to become the rhythmic basis of the Trio’s second movement.) Opinions may differ as to

whether such works can be assimilated into postmodernism, but there seems little doubt that

43 In a programme note for the British première of the five-movement version of the Piano Concerto, Richard Toop,commenting on Ligeti’s ‘aesthetic credo’ (cited in footnote 10), remarks: ‘At one level, it is a surprising claim, in thatmany aspects of the work coincide rather exactly with post-modernist ideals in architecture and the visual arts’;programme note (BBC Promenade Concert, Royal Albert Hall, London, 2 September 1993). Jane Piper Clendenningadopts a similar viewpoint on the same work in ‘Postmodern Architecture/Postmodern Music’. Peter Niklas Wilson,meanwhile, referring to Charles Jencks’s well-known definition of postmodernism as characterized by ambiguity and‘double coding’, notes that ‘much in Ligeti’s sound-world is also double – or rather multiply – coded. It is a world ofstylistic false trails, absurdities and ambiguities, of trompe l’oreille’; Wilson, ‘Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit’, 44.

44 Quoted in Wilson, ‘Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit’, 44.45 Ligeti, liner notes to György Ligeti Edition 7, 14.46 See Joakim Tillman, ‘Postmodernism and Art Music’, 75–91.47 Toop writes that, as Schott, his own publisher, signed up these former pupils of his, ‘Ligeti found this situation acutely

uncomfortable. . . . [H]e certainly did not wish to see his reasons for rejecting the Darmstadt legacy equated withtheirs’; Toop, György Ligeti, 152.

48 Lobanova, ‘ ‘‘Ich sehe keinen Widerspruch’’ ’, 12.




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the category played an essential role in defining, differentially at least, Ligeti’s own aesthetic

posture at the start of the decade.

The confident dismissal of both modernism and postmodernism thus masks a prolonged

and often anxious dialectical engagement with these terms and the compositional tendencies

they represent. Constantin Floros may proclaim his ‘enviable indifference towards the

fashions of the day’,49 but ultimately Ligeti reveals himself as acutely fashion-conscious,

positioned at each stage of his career squarely within the key dialogues underway within the

artworld of New Music. As Barthes says of his ‘neither–nor’ critic, ‘it is only when man

proclaims his primal liberty that his subordination is least disputable’.50 This is to suggest

that Ligeti’s declarations of independence from concepts such as modern, postmodern, avant

garde, and traditional signify covert dependence on them rather than effortless transcen-

dence. At any rate, as we have noted, Ligeti’s position-takings tend to be taken far more

seriously by his commentators than by the composer himself, who in his more expansive

confessions often shows a disarming readiness to undermine their simplistic oppositions.

What is often presented as extraordinary – Ligeti’s eluding of ‘standard’ categories –

thus turns out to be part and parcel of a thoroughly commonplace position-taking strat-

egy. Though read by some as emblematic of his singularity and uniqueness, his double

refusals simply align him with historical forebears and their similar attempts at artistic

survival in an otherwise impersonal and overcrowded market. Ligeti, however, has gone

one stage further in creating a sense of the rarity of his techniques and compositional

procedures through the development of a personal, ‘custom-made’ vocabulary for the

analytical description of his works. In the 1970s he enumerated the components of what he

then unapologetically called the ‘Ligeti style’, with such terms as ‘micropolyphony’ (refer-

ring to dense aggregations of individual polyphonic lines within a narrow intervallic

bandwidth), ‘intervallic seed crystals’ (simple harmonic building blocks, such as the ‘typi-

cal Ligeti signal’ of the whole tone and minor third, which build into or re-emerge from a

denser harmonic texture) and ‘meccanico-type music’ (involving the rapid, obsessive

repetition of individual notes or melodic patterns). Moreover he underscored the personal

nature of certain of these terms by invoking autobiographical associations. He relates the

ticking sounds of ‘meccanico-type music’ to a short story by the Hungarian writer Gyula

Krudy about a widow living alone in a house full of clocks, barometers, and other intricate

mechanisms.51 The dense micropolyphonic textures, on the other hand, he associates with

a childhood dream, often quoted by Ligeti commentators, in which the path to his bed was

blocked by a huge, dense web of filament in which beetles, moths, and various pieces of

rotting detritus were trapped.52 His fear of spiders is something else he suggests may have

influenced the notion of ‘the impenetrable web of sound’ – as he puts it, ‘an original Ligeti

invention’.53

49 Floros, ‘Hommage’, 25.50 Barthes, ‘Neither–Nor Criticism’, 82.51 Ligeti in Conversation, 17.52 The dream was first recounted in Ligeti’s article ‘Zustände, Ereignisse, Wandlungen’ (1967), 165–9; translated by

Jonathan Bernard as ‘States, Events, Transformations’, 164–71. See also Ligeti in Conversation, 25n.53 Ligeti in Conversation, 26.




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These autobiographical allusions are both attractive and remarkably potent. As in

conventional autobiography, appeals to childhood experience can prove problematic be-

yond simple matters of truth or falsity (and one has no reason to doubt that Ligeti’s accounts

have a basis in actual events).54 The very fact that they cannot be straightforwardly contra-

dicted or gainsaid lends them an authority that claims of a more orthodox technical or

historical nature, more readily vulnerable to refutation or challenge, will rarely possess.

These autobiographical ‘alibis’ help to dispel the aura of chilly remoteness that normally

surrounds avant-garde figures, presenting, by contrast, a friendly and personal image of

the composer and a view of the music rich in metaphorical, even quasi-programmatic,

content.55 And in doing so they unite with his talk of the synaesthetic association of ‘sounds

with color, form and texture’ and the ‘involuntary conversion of optical and tactile into

acoustic sensations’56 to drive home the sense of an instinctive and unmediated engagement

with sound, a world away from the ‘abstract’ cerebration of the serialists. Hence Ove

Nordwall writes of Ligeti’s ‘non-speculative, concrete attitude’, which ‘places him in absolute

contrast to Stockhausen or – still more obviously – to Boulez’.57

The autobiographical ‘alibis’ also serve more specific differentiating functions by encour-

aging us to follow through their causal implications: Ligeti’s hatred of spiders gave rise to

dreams about large impenetrable cobwebs, which in turn explain the technique of ‘micro-

polyphony’ with its dense, knotty, web-like textures.58 We thus arrive at a purely immanent

rationale for a technique that one would otherwise probably seek to explain in terms of

Ligeti’s responses to the work of fellow composers.59 At this time many composers besides

Ligeti and Stockhausen were writing pieces using ‘sound masses’, static or internally mobile

chromatic clusters, albeit often articulated in different ways.60 Ligeti has expressed irritation

at the way in which he ‘was put into the same pigeon-hole with Penderecki’ and works such

54 ‘In most autobiographical records of childhood there will be episodes the details of which are accurate and otherswhich are misremembered; but almost inevitably their authors will take up an attitude to both which is personal andsubjective. Even more inevitably, they will rely for their records on language which must, to some degree, be therepository of what they have experienced between the period when the episode took place and the moment theydecided to describe it’; Ellis, Literary Lives, 66.

55 In a characteristically oxymoronic formulation – a near-relative of the double refusal – Ligeti refers to ‘pro-gramme music without a programme’; Ligeti in Conversation, 102. In the earlier article ‘States, Events, Trans-formations’ Ligeti had declared his uneasiness about attaching programmes to his music: ‘nothing could be furtherfrom my intention than to create illustrative or wholly programmatic art’ (165). But symptomatically the articlebegins by recounting the childhood dream mentioned above, and the vocabulary of the following description ofApparitions – ‘filaments’, ‘webwork’, a ‘tear’ in the structure – seems to invite an almost blow-by-blow pro-grammatic hearing.

56 Ligeti, ‘States, Events, Transformations’, 165.57 Nordwall, György Ligeti: eine Monographie, 18.58 Ligeti may hesitate to broach the idea of such a straightforward causality (see Ligeti in Conversation, 26), but once

suggested the implication is almost impossible to dislodge.59 Floros, among others, treats the childhood dream as of determining significance in Ligeti’s compositional make-up

– ‘a key, indeed the key for a deeper understanding of Ligeti’s music’; ‘Hommage’, 27.60 At the time he wrote Apparitions and Atmosphères Ligeti knew some of these sound-mass pieces, such as Stock-

hausen’s Gruppen and Carré, but not others. Of Xenakis, according to Richard Steinitz, he knew Pithoprakta but notMetastasis; see Steinitz, György Ligeti, 92. On the matter of Penderecki’s influence Ligeti is equivocal: in 1975 heremarked that Anaklasis may have ‘left its mark’ on Atmosphères, given that he encountered it while the latter was ‘stillin rough draft’; see Ligeti in Conversation, 37. Steinitz, on the other hand, suggests (99) that Ligeti was unaware of thisexample.




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as Atmosphères were lumped into the category of ‘texture music’.61 Just as Ligeti had earlier

sought to assert his difference from the ‘serialists’, he now needed to assert his difference

from the ‘timbralists’.62 The personalized generic category of ‘micropolyphony’ achieves this

by deflecting attention away from surface – the rather pejorative connotations of super-

ficiality associated with terms such as ‘timbre composition’ – and back to deep structure,

from ‘mere’ sound quality to painstaking, craftsmanlike construction. The spider’s web with

its combination of intricacy and strength offers, needless to say, the perfect metaphor.

In this way these alibis serve to reinforce the sense of an independent and logical stylistic

evolution, free of significant aberration or rupture. The invocation of the Krudy short story

depicting the house full of ticking clocks helps to bring back within the fold that most

notorious black sheep in the family of Ligeti’s compositions, the Poème symphonique for 100

metronomes of 1962. At the time, as Ligeti has begun to acknowledge again only recently, the

work was conceived as a theatrical happening in the Fluxus tradition. Ligeti had been

informally co-opted to Fluxus by its founder, George Maciunas, in 1960, and in 1961 he

produced two works that seemed entirely consonant with the group’s agenda: the ‘silent’

lecture, Die Zukunft der Musik, and the Trois bagatelles for piano, a rather crass satire on

Cage’s 4′33″.63 What had clearly been a moment of profound uncertainty in terms of his

future creative direction tended to be dealt with over the next three decades in a variety of

ways, from outright dismissal of the works concerned to attempts to pass them off as earnest

critique. Ove Nordwall, supporting his rather implausible claim that the Trois bagatelles have

‘nothing to do with Cageian ‘‘neo-Dadaism’’ ’, quotes a letter from Ligeti in which the

composer characterizes these pieces as ‘marginal products, commentaries, so to speak, on the

current compositional situation’, before adding ‘I am indeed ‘‘serious’’ and do not belong to

‘‘Fluxus’’ ’.64 In justifying the existence of the metronome piece the Krudy anecdote plays

a clear and indispensable role, integrating that maverick experiment smoothly within a

coherent, logical narrative stretching backwards to childhood and forwards through the

‘demonic clocks’ movement of Nouvelles aventures (a work completed three years later in

1965) to the Second String Quartet (1968) and beyond. Indeed he once characterized the

metronome piece as a ‘preparatory stage’65 for the pizzicato movement of the string quartet

61 Ligeti in Conversation, 39.62 It seems that he was, however, willing to be a fellow traveller for a while. For instance, he gave lectures on ‘Die

Komposition mit Klangfarben’ at Darmstadt in 1962; see Borio and Danuser, eds., Im Zenit der Moderne, vol. 3,614.

63 In 1997 he wrote of how he became ‘a member of the Fluxus movement without having intentionally joined. Back in1960, the founder of Fluxus, George Maciunas, had informed me that I belonged to Fluxus with the simple argument:‘‘Ligeti, I want you.’’ So, since I was already a member, as well as a friend to Nam June Paik – another important artistworking in this direction – I suggested or performed numerous Fluxus pieces in the following two years’; liner notesto György Ligeti Edition 5, 8.

64 Nordwall, György Ligeti, 38. Another letter quoted by Nordwall describes the purpose of Poème symphonique as adouble refusal of ‘modernity’ and ‘philistinism’, directed against both ‘the ‘‘radical’’ compositional situation’ and‘official concert life’, as well as ‘against all ideologies’. He continues: ‘It is no surprise that Poème symphonique wasrejected both by the petty bourgeois . . . [and] by the ostensibly ‘‘radical’’ ’ (8). But it is hard to see how the workresists absorption into the domain of the ‘happening’ or similar manifestations of ‘the ‘‘radical’’ compositionalsituation’; and, if indeed it was a satire on ‘official concert life’, it sits uneasily with Ligeti’s later output, which consistsalmost exclusively of concert music for traditional forces.

65 Ligeti in Conversation, 108.




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and for the harpsichord piece Continuum, as if it were designed as some kind of composition

study – surely stretching a point, even if one concedes the possibility that empirical obser-

vations from the metronome experiment were fed into later pieces. And while Ligeti has been

freer of late in acknowledging the circumstances of the work’s creation, he has sought, at the

same time, to consolidate its status as an abstract non-theatrical work, in keeping with his

view of its place within an immanently logical stylistic development. Ligeti speaks of having,

in recent performances, ‘dispensed with the Fluxus ceremony altogether, which is really

rather superfluous’; and he has permitted two recordings which, by virtue of the medium,

present the work stripped of its formerly essential visual and theatrical dimensions.66

In much the same way that Ligeti’s ‘neither–nor’ rhetoric seems to migrate naturally into

commentary on his music, so references to ‘micropolyphony’, ‘meccanico’, ‘harmonic

crystals’, and the like pepper books and articles on the composer, often having shed their

quotation marks. This is not to say that all the writers concerned have adopted Ligeti’s

categories uncritically. Analysts especially have considered certain of these terms to require

further theoretical refinement, while disputing the precise nature and limits of others. For

instance, Jane Piper Clendenning has introduced within the domains of ‘micropolyphony’

and ‘meccanico-type music’ the subcategories of ‘microcanon’ and ‘pattern meccanico’;67

while Michael Hicks establishes four empirical categories of interval – ‘boundary interval’,

‘partition interval’, ‘projection interval’, and ‘blur interval’ – to further articulate what Ligeti

describes as passages within his music of ‘mistiness’ (lack of clear intervallic profile) followed

by ‘clearing up’ (reassertion of intervallic definition).68 But while it is encouraging to see this

idiosyncratic vocabulary subjected to the full glare of rigorous theoretical scrutiny, it seems

unlikely that these terms will ever be applied to music other than Ligeti’s, at least not unless

his influence is being suggested.69 Their perpetuation ensures that his music will continue to

be discussed mainly in isolation and in its own terms; and their ongoing adaptation at the

hands of different theorists if anything serves to entrench them further, lending them an air

of permanence and canonicity.

IIInterviewed by Ulrich Dibelius in 1993, Ligeti confessed to feeling ‘guilty’ about the influence

his own discourse and vocabulary had exerted, noting how ‘the best intentioned critics and

musicologists often paid more attention to the texts than the music’.70 Even the favourite

term ‘micropolyphony’, once considered ‘such a beautiful word’,71 was now denigrated as ‘so

66 Liner notes to György Ligeti Edition 5, 13.67 Clendenning, ‘The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of György Ligeti’, 192–234; ‘Structural Factors in the Micro-

canonic Compositions of György Ligeti’, 229–56. For discussion of the nature of ‘meccanico’ as a category (and thevalidity of ‘net-structure’) see Roig-Francoli, ‘Harmonic and Formal Processes in Ligeti’s Net-Structure Composi-tions’, and the review of this article by Clendenning.

68 Hicks, ‘Interval and Form in Ligeti’s Continuum and Coulée’, 172–90; see also Ligeti in Conversation, 60–61.69 This is the case when Peter Burt uses the term in his discussion of Takemitsu’s Autumn; see The Music of Toru

Takemitsu, 127 (referring back to 98).70 Dibelius, ‘Gespräch über Ästhetik’, 256.71 Ligeti in Conversation, 15.




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ridiculously pompous’.72 But Ligeti is by no means the only twentieth-century composer

whose published statements have fundamentally shaped the reception of his music, even if

his is an extreme case.73 It is often noted how writing on late twentieth-century music has

slipped all too often into a kind of ghost-writing, in which critics effectively replicate

composers’ own accounts of their music.74 Even in analytical writing, as was observed above,

there remains a tendency to treat composers’ self-interpretations and their characteristic

vocabulary more as a tool in the work’s analysis – the ‘key’ that unlocks its secrets – than as

part of the body of material requiring analysis.75 All this testifies to the survival of an almost

fetishistic belief in the authenticity and privileged status of composers’ commentaries, and a

failure on the part of criticism to find alternative sites of engagement. But, as we have seen in

Ligeti’s case, more complex problems arise when criticism absorbs as constative – as ‘fact’ or

neutral description – statements that are equally performative in nature, just as when analysis

appropriates customized technical vocabulary while ignoring the strategic, ‘differentiating’

function that this very customization is designed to serve. And as writing on a whole range of

composers hymns similar litanies of uniqueness, hedging itself around with an exclusive,

composer-patented vocabulary, this inevitably affects how we form our historical image of

the recent past. The private lexicons associated with the work of so many composers – terms

such as the ‘Kernformeln’ and ‘Superformeln’ of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the ‘tintinnabuli’ of

Arvo Pärt, and even the idiosyncratically defamiliarized ‘tonics’, ‘dominants’, and other

tonal ‘functions’ in the symphonic works of Peter Maxwell Davies – can be read almost as

coded warnings to the scholar that comparison of their aesthetic or procedures with those of

others is at best misguided, at worst simply futile. Nothing speaks more loudly, perhaps, for

the widespread belief in the incommensurability of contemporary composers’ outputs than

the fact that monographs on single composers and their works make up such a large

proportion of books about twentieth-century music. This is not to say that all such studies

fail to locate their subject within a wider field of compositional activity. But each seems to

justify its existence by portraying an incomparable individual who ‘stands apart’ from

contemporaries. Little wonder that many conceive of contemporary art music, in defiance of

John Donne’s famous dictum, in terms of an archipelago of composer-islands, some more

tightly clustered than others, but each surrounded by its own ring of blue water.

This kind of fragmented picture might be viewed as a logical outcome of the mythology of

modernism. ‘The great modernisms’, Fredric Jameson writes, were ‘predicated on the in-

vention of a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable as

your own body . . . organically linked to the conception of a unique personality and indi-

viduality [with] its own unique vision of the world’.76 This myth, he suggested back in 1982,

72 Dibelius, ‘Gespräch über Ästhetik’, 254.73 The back-cover text of Steinitz’s book is symptomatic, consisting entirely of quotations from the composer, which

are simply left to ‘speak for themselves’.74 See, for instance, Albrecht Riethmüller, ‘Komposition, Ästhetik, Musikwissenschaft’, 13.75 I am echoing here Carl Dahlhaus’s comment that a composer’s self-analyses should be treated as ‘material that

requires interpretation, rather than predetermining that interpretation’; Dahlhaus, ‘Muss Neue Musik erklärtwerden?’, 35.

76 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 114.




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was being unmasked as a ‘philosophical and cultural mystification’. But to judge the ‘ideol-

ogy of the unique self’ to be ‘over and done with’77 seems as premature now as it arguably was

then, given that the ‘pluralist’ paradigm which evolved under modernism – dependent on

this notion of innumerable isolated and incommensurable practices – has remained just as

central to (and, if anything, more radically asserted within) postmodernism. Early (modern-

ist) formulations of pluralism (and I quote perhaps the most influential with respect to

music, that of Leonard B. Meyer) saw the present and future co-existence of ‘an indefinite

number of styles and idioms, techniques and movements . . . in each of the arts’ as an

inevitable consequence of the personal, experimental agendas of individual artists and their

creation of works of art as hermetic constructs ‘whose validity is internal or contextual’.78

A later historian, Robert P. Morgan, who cites approvingly Meyer’s prognosis for contem-

porary culture, likewise sees the absolute autonomy of the artwork as a central feature of this

‘unfocused pluralism’:

Our fragmented and dissociated manner of life, reflecting the loss of an encom-

passing social framework capable of ordering and integrating the varied facets of

human activity, has received its faithful expression in the autonomy and particu-

larization of the musical composition. The Western musical work, having since

the Renaissance progressively severed its connections with ‘outside’ institutions –

first the Church and then various centralized political agencies (monarchical,

aristocratic, and democratic) – now proclaims its isolation and independence

from other musical compositions as well.79

On the basis of Jameson’s comments in 1982, one might expect such a notion, predicated

on autonomous individuals and autonomous artworks, to have been robustly challenged by

postmodernists. But, if anything, the kind of ‘heterotopia’ envisaged by Michel Foucault,

Jean-François Lyotard, and others – a far more radical assertion of pure difference which at

times seems to exclude altogether the possibility of communality – would seem no better

equipped to challenge the mythology of the ‘unique self ’. Postmodernism’s much-vaunted

refusal of totality and consensus tends to lead, as Honi Fern Haber has suggested, to the

return of something resembling the ‘individualist’ subject of traditional liberalism, rather

than the kind of subject one would expect postmodernists more naturally to favour – the

subject shaped by social, historical, and cultural forces, who can never be considered truly in

isolation. Lyotard’s call to ‘wage war on totality’,80 Haber writes, may warn appropriately

against ‘ignoring the plural or ‘‘protean’’ nature of selves, community, and culture’.81 But, at

the same time, by figuring negatively any kind of consensus it risks a ‘universalizing of

77 Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, 115.78 Meyer, Music, the Arts and Ideas, 172, 235. ‘Contextuality’ or ‘contextualism’ was the term used by advocates of the

American New Criticism (and later by music theorists such as Milton Babbitt) to refer to a work whose definingrelationships are immanent and, by implication, unique to that work: hence it is a primarily formal definition ofautonomy.

79 Morgan, ‘Rethinking Musical Culture’, 58.80 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82.81 Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 4.




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difference’, which fails to consider subjects as culturally and socially situated and thus, iron-

ically, allows the reinstatement of the Romantic notion of autonomous creativity. Thus, as

before, artworks are seen as arising ‘from a private exchange between the idiosyncratic artist

and her or his muse’ rather than out of vocabularies that ‘are always already social, cultural,

and historical products’.82

In place of this involuntarily restored bourgeois subject Haber proposes a notion of the

‘subject-in-community’. This views the subject as moulded inescapably by social and com-

munal allegiances and affiliations, though (since ‘we are all many ‘‘selves’’ and members of

many ‘‘communities’’ ’83) these affiliations will be multiple and constantly open to redescrip-

tion. This has obvious resonances with the views of Bourdieu and Becker, who see artists as

defined by plural relationships – whether of solidarity or antagonism – within the artistic

field. A scholar, Bourdieu writes, ‘cannot understand anything about a work of art, least of all

what makes its singularity, when it takes an author or a work in isolation’.84 ‘Singularity’,

‘originality’ even, is therefore always a product of differential relationships, and needs to be

understood in terms of communal ties ‘between the artist and other artists and, beyond

them, the whole set of agents engaged in the production of the work’.85 If, as so often, artists

feel they have an interest in proclaiming their autonomy, it is the critic’s duty to demystify

rather than collude in this essentially strategic position.

In any case, the non-hierarchical and non-totalizing claims of pluralist ideology require

careful interrogation.86 As many commentators have suggested, pluralism’s very agnosticism

regarding legitimation criteria and horizons of value opens the way for cruder and, arguably,

still more hegemonic forms of authority to assert themselves. A legitimation crisis is also,

among other things, a power vacuum – and, as few of us are unaware, it is one that the market

has lost no time in filling, with the resulting assimilation of the cultural into the socio-

economic realm. Pluralism may appear to celebrate unbridled multiplicity and seemingly

unlimited novelty. But along with this multiplicity comes the need to make it pay; and this

tends in practice to mean containing it, regulating it, and ultimately curtailing the parts of it

that fail to reap sufficient return. Just as the brand identities of multinationals invade cities

the world over, making them look ever more dispiritingly alike, so the increasing dominance

of market forces within the cultural sphere often results in blandness and homogeneity.

Indeed, Terry Eagleton suggests, ‘the more culture is commercialized, the more the im-

position of market discipline forces its producers into the conservative values of prudence,

anti-innovation, and a nervousness of being disruptive’.87 In the field of contemporary music

this has often meant a high degree of reticence and caution, with many of the large and

historically influential publishers and recording companies seeking to minimize risks on

‘untried formulas’. One does not have to revert to a crude negative correlation between

82 Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 2.83 Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 4.84 Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, 142.85 Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, 140.86 Many of the points in Hal Foster’s essay ‘Against Pluralism’ retain their force and pertinence two decades on; see his

Recodings, 13–32.87 Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 71.




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artistic worth and commercial value to feel anxious that certain rare and interesting forms of

artistic activity, far from being celebrated in the apparent multiplicity of the present climate,

are in danger of becoming perilously marginal.

This increasing encroachment of big business is something that Ligeti, for one, professes

to abhor. He has declared, for instance, his hatred of ‘the superficial and mendacious

consumer culture’,88 the impossibility, as he sees it, of ‘surrendering to commercialism and

insisting on authenticity at the same time’,89 and his perplexity at the way in which ‘the artists

of a critical, subversive counter-culture allow themselves to be willingly supported by spon-

sors, grants, and industrial and commercial giants’.90 This ‘disavowal of the economic’91 is

entirely characteristic of the modernist artist who has, in Bourdieu’s phrase, an ‘interest in

disinterestedness’92 – an interest in demonstrating his or her indifference to financial gain, its

trappings of worldly success, and ways of nurturing that success through promotion and

publicity. Promotion, of course, was never absent from the environment of modernist art,

even if it often took less explicit and recognizable forms.93 But now, as the market encroaches

on the former ‘high art’ sphere, these ‘euphemized’ kinds of promotion get caught up

increasingly in more explicit types of marketing. As the name of the author comes to function

increasingly less as ‘the signatured assertion of a property right’ and more as what Andrew

Wernick calls a ‘promotional sign’ – ‘a vehicle for whatever significance, reputation or myth

(including, generically, the myth of the author-creator itself) that name has come to acquire’

– anything capable of giving that sign ‘nuance or sharpness’ serves potentially to bolster its

value.94 The image of the artist as isolated outsider – cultivated assiduously by Ligeti, above

all through his ‘neither–nor’ position-taking – becomes a prestigious symbol, a mark of

authenticity, though this ‘outsider’ no longer signifies a genuine other, the often genuinely

impoverished and isolated bohemian artist of the early nineteenth century, but rather what

Hal Foster calls a ‘token of otherness’, a mere ‘emblem of the marginality to which artists

were once consigned’.95 In this way the stubborn creative independence that forms a central

component in Ligeti’s self-representation – and which represents, in his eyes at least,

independence too from the encroaching forces of commercialism – proves ultimately

vulnerable to co-option by the very promotional forces it sets out to resist.

88 Beyer, ‘György Ligeti’, 11.89 Beyer, ‘György Ligeti’, 11.90 Floros, ‘Wohin orientiert sich die Musik?’, 8. Norman Lebrecht, writing in the preface to the second edition of his

controversial account of the corporatization of the classical music industry, cites Ligeti among a small number ofprominent musicians who rallied to his defence; Lebrecht, When the Music Stops, 14.

91 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 64.92 Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, 49.93 It is worth pointing out, perhaps, that the interview is one notable form of euphemized promotion. It may seem like

merely a convenient and less time-consuming expedient for the busy, hard-pressed composer. But that verysuggestion – that the subject has selflessly broken off from the real work of composition in order simply to talk aboutit – serves only to further the notion that ‘music alone’ is the composer’s concern, not any desire to explain it orpersuade people to like it or invest in it. While, say, writing an article implies a deliberate motivation – an active desireto say something – the subject of an interview can plausibly appear passive and reticent, or reluctant and disengaged.The reticence may or may not be genuine, but a sense of disinterestedness that chimes with modernist decorum iscreated all the same.

94 Wernick, ‘Authorship and the Supplement of Promotion’, 87.95 Foster, Recodings, 36.




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Since the late 1980s the marketing of Ligeti’s music has played relentlessly on the image of

the composer as ‘maverick’, exploiting his striking appearance – what one journalist, in a

preview article for the ‘Ligeti by Ligeti’ Festival at the South Bank in London in autumn 1989,

described as ‘the professorial shock of white hair, the sunken eyes’.96 The Festival’s central

image – on posters, leaflets, and the programme book itself – was of the head of the grinning

composer bursting through a red and blue hoop against a bright yellow background (see

Plate 1). The head was in black and white, apart from bright red ‘lipstick’ and streaks of blue

daubed onto the eyelids and dimples. ‘They make me look like a clown’, Ligeti was reported

to complain;97 and this was evidently the intent. Hal Foster sees this embrace ‘of the utterly

conventional roles of the artist as bohemian, child, clown, madman’ in recent art as ‘an act of

abandon in the face of a culture that offers nothing but myths and masks, in which all signs

of the individual, the original, the transgressive seem coded’.98 And other expressions of

resistance and marginality find themselves similarly liable to appropriation: hence also

the instrumentality of ‘the myth of the artist-as-exile to both the mass-cultural and art-

market apparatuses’.99 Ligeti, of course, is a genuine exile, having experienced both inner

emigration, as a Hungarian in Romanian-governed Transylvania and then as a Jew under

Nazi occupation, and physical emigration, in his flight from Hungary to Austria in 1956. Still

one finds his exile status invoked by some as a key determinant of his artistic habitus, in ways

that can seem dangerously essentialist. In an article symptomatically entitled ‘On the Benefits

of Rootlessness’, Peter Niklas Wilson begins by quoting Vilém Flusser’s comments on exile as

a ‘breeding ground for creative acts, for the new’, and the migrant as ‘herald of the future’.

He then proceeds to attribute Ligeti’s ‘preference for stylistic masks, for fundamental equi-

vocation, his aversion to grand gesture, emphatic confession’ to the fact that ‘otherness,

non-belonging are formative, fundamental experiences of his existence’.100 Elsewhere the

composer’s emigré status is treated simply as a badge of artistic prestige, his passport of entry

to that venerable line of ‘stateless’ twentieth-century creators that includes Picasso and

Stravinsky.101

Just as promotion exploits the image of the autonomous artist central to the modernist

tradition, so it draws in also the discourse surrounding the autonomous artwork, that of

stylistic innovation and originality. For the modernist artist stylistic innovation was in itself

an aesthetic imperative, aiming, in Marx Wartofsky’s words, to ‘enlarge the horizon of

96 White, ‘Fears of a Clown’. Marketing plans for the Ligeti Project, the complete CD edition launched by SonyClassical in 1996 (and completed by Warner Classics when Sony later aborted it), mention Ligeti’s ‘unique face’ asa means to ‘develop a real identification’ between the composer and the record-buying public; minutes of apresentation by Philippe Pénicaut of Sony Classical given at Royal Festival Hall, London, 18 November 1994; heldat archive of Schott Edition, London. Quoted by permission of Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Limited.

97 White, ‘Fears of a Clown’.98 Foster, Recodings, 36.99 Foster, Recodings, 134.

100 Wilson, ‘Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit’, 42. The starkly contrasted case studies treated by Critchfield in WhenLucifer Cometh demonstrate that, while the perception or projection of self as alien or outsider may be a commonstrand in the self-representation of exiles, so also is the contrary, perhaps overcompensating desire for integrationand assimilation.

101 Burde, György Ligeti, 9. Terry Eagleton writes scathingly of this tendency to ‘idealize the notion of diaspora’ on thepart of ‘more callow postmodernists . . . for whom nationlessness is next to godliness’; The Idea of Culture, 44.




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Plate 1 Cover illustration for programme book, ‘Ligeti by Ligeti’ Festival, South Bank Centre, London,19 October – 6 November 1989. Reproduced by permission of The Royal Festival Hall, South BankCentre, London.




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aesthetic sensibility [rather than] merely to repeat established formulae’.102 In an increas-

ingly commodified art market, however, it is liable to become fetishized, exploited for the

sake of the work’s ‘competitive marketability’. In this context the ‘naming’ of a style – its

‘baptism’ in terms of a distinct and differential identity – often becomes as crucial as the

‘creation’ of the style itself. We have so far emphasized the strategic function of Ligeti’s

custom-made generic categories, in that the naming of ‘micropolyphony’ distinguishes it

from other techniques of cluster-based chromatic writing. But at least ‘micropolyphony’

refers to an empirically observable characteristic of the writing – namely the use of strict

canonic imitation. With the fetishization of stylistic innovation, on the other hand, the

ascription of style comes to float increasingly free of the work and its verifiable attributes. As

the work comes to inhabit what Wartofsky calls a ‘space of reputation’, dependent upon its

being ‘conceived and talked about in a certain way’, the discourse surrounding the work

becomes increasingly detached from it, with an altogether less binding responsibility to

‘represent’ it truthfully. Certainly, as that discourse is drawn increasingly into promotion,

stylistic markers seem to be selected increasingly for the associations they evoke. Given

pluralism’s tendency to legitimize works that embody (or can be represented as embodying)

the multiplicity it so prizes, lists of diverse generic and cultural influences – the more widely

dispersed temporally and geographically the better – carry a notable cachet. Nowhere is this

more evident than in the reception of Ligeti’s music of the last two decades. The ‘influences’

he cites in respect of works such as the piano études – Central African drumming, Ars nova,

Balinese gamelan, Chopin, Nancarrow – become in the hands of promoters an appropriately

alluring cluster of references, which suggests their availability for ‘consumption’ as yet

another example of an ‘accessible’ intercultural eclecticism, in a way which no doubt causes

Ligeti much irritation and dismay.103

It is in this way that figures such as Ligeti fare, paradoxically perhaps, rather well in the

current environment. A notionally value-free pluralism tends to favour those who are al-

ready on top; and the names of those who established themselves at the high-water mark of

modernism’s cultural authority continue to be traded as valued promotional signs, even at a

time when modernism itself seems to have fallen from grace. A composer like Ligeti can

afford the dignified stance of disinterestedness, and he is certainly swift in denouncing those

of his colleagues ‘who want to sell themselves, to get to know the right people, to make the

right connections with a recording company, and to join the right circles’.104 But for many

composers who have grown up in an environment where no such potent forms of cultural

legitimation exist, appealing directly to potential audiences, publishers, and critics through

overt and explicit forms of self-promotion can seem like the only option, other than the

102 Wartofsky, ‘The Politics of Art’, 223–4.103 Again the marketing proposals for the Ligeti Project stress ‘the remarkable influences from various ages, sciences

and arts (painting, mathematics, renaissance etc ...). At the point of ultimate sophistication, his music is alwaysaccessible and emotional’; minutes of Pénicaut presentation (see note 96), quoted by permission of Sony MusicEntertainment (UK) Limited. Ligeti frequently polemicizes against the homogeneous ‘levelled-out culture’ pro-duced by ‘world music’; see Floros, ‘Wohin orientiert sich die Musik?’, 5.

104 Beyer, ‘György Ligeti’, 11.




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limited peer recognition offered by the specialist contemporary music circuit.105 Either way,

the need to pre-empt expectations, whether those of a mainstream audience or a bursary-

awarding jury, is likely to foster caution and conformity. Indeed one of the ironies of the

current situation is that the more artistic activity is multiplied, the more significant becomes

the consecrating authority of major publishers, broadcasters, recording companies, and

commissioning bodies in marking individuals out from the crowd.106 New technologies

may give composers the freedom to produce and disseminate their own scores and record-

ings, but still it is the relatively small number of composers on the lists of the major

international publishers who dominate the new music festivals and attract the most

prestigious commissions.

Established modernists like Ligeti had another inestimable advantage at the start of their

careers, namely an active role in a vibrant musical and intellectual subculture. Ligeti may now

refer to circles such as Darmstadt or Cologne as cliques or mafias: the rhetoric of autonomy

tends, while elevating the self-sufficient individual, to brand institutions rigid, academic, or

stultifying. But at least they provided a collective forum for debate, where agreement

remained possible on the nature of the problems, if not always on the solutions. Creative

subcultures do not precondition the work pursued under their aegis: but the framework they

establish fosters vision and poses challenges which allow individuals to reach beyond them-

selves. To today’s composers the possibility of such communal projects, based on shared

aesthetic commitments, probably seems remote. As Julian Johnson has noted, pluralism’s

‘capacity to integrate and appropriate almost any style makes the polarization required by

critical subcultures more difficult’.107 Indeed to some younger composers, the ideology of the

autonomous creator has taken root to such an extent that the idea of group solidarity is

distinctly unappealing: the message handed down from their established elders is that

strength is to be found in isolation. The (then) twenty-eight-year-old British composer

Joseph Phibbs is introduced in the prospectus for the BBC Promenade Concerts of 2002 as

owing his ‘strong compositional voice to his refusal to follow fashion’; the composer himself

is quoted as being ‘not keen on the idea of musical ideologies or camps’.108 With Ligeti we at

least had some idea of what ‘musical ideologies or camps’ he was refusing. Now it appears

that difference pure and simple – refusal per se – is enough.109 This has worrying implications.

105 This new direct form of self-marketing by composers is one of the issues explored by Timothy D. Taylor in ‘Musicand Musical Practices in Postmodernity’. Interestingly we find Pierre Boulez, from his similarly privileged vantagepoint, denouncing (quite as vigorously as Ligeti does the sphere of commerce) the contemporary music circuit,which is created for ‘a certain limited public’ and relied upon by ‘weaker characters’ who have ‘fallen into the trapand have written their music entirely in terms of this small network’; Boulez, Conversations with Célestin Deliège, 77.

106 Howard Becker has pointed out how in the USA as early as the 1970s the total number of literary magazinesexceeded 1500. Of those only around two or three had a circulation of 10,000 or more readers. With theproliferation of publishing outlets, only those authors published by one of the few large-circulation magazines hadany opportunity ‘to achieve reputations that have wide currency and thus represent the consensus of a major artworld’; Becker, Art Worlds, 363.

107 Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?, 115.108 Threasher, ‘Proms Commissions and Premières’, 44.109 Or clearly the editor of these comments thought so. The remark may have been made in a richer and more

informative context; but that someone thought it a sufficiently meaningful artistic credo to be isolated in this wayis arguably significant in itself.




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Being valued for your individuality may be gratifying; but being valued only for your

individuality ultimately implies that any individual will do just as well as you. Composers

who cling to the time-honoured tactic of universal refusal may think they are bidding for

uniqueness and a stake in posterity. But the prizing of individuals (or, at least, the sign of

individuality) under pluralism seems to be less an index of their value than of their equiva-

lence, interchangeability, and – ultimately – disposability.

György Ligeti remains a galvanizing presence on the new music scene, with a remarkable

capacity for innovation and self-renewal. Yet that capacity is ultimately best understood not

as an abstracted essence but in terms of its historicity, the conditions that created it – an active

dialectical negotiation between existing positions within the field of contemporary art music,

and a sense of those past struggles and dependencies that he intermittently and at times

reluctantly acknowledges. For any discourse that suggests the simple transcendence of

critical categories inevitably fosters cults rather than culture, individual (and individualist)

rather than collective values. Critical vocabularies are, after all, the medium for communal

expression of those values, the vehicle for ongoing conversation and debate. They need to be

kept alive, precisely so that they can develop and be transformed. The composer’s desire to

reject or invalidate communal critical discourse is, for reasons that we have examined, often

understandable; but critics, those who should be seeking to ‘connect phenomena which both

require and resist connection’,110 need to be wary of colluding in this process. For the need

for criticism’s alternative vision has rarely been more urgent. With column inches allocated

to it invariably declining, not to mention its increasing manipulation by publishers (from

whose promotional material it can at times be barely distinguishable), criticism risks, in its

retreat, leaving behind a situation where only the loudest voices – those backed by the

strongest promotional machinery – will get heard.

We have noted the benefits Ligeti derived from the vibrant polemical environment of

Cologne in the later 1950s. Certainly the future emergence of comparably invigorating

figures will be dependent on our recognizing the role that communal artistic cultures play

in shaping musical identities. And these are cultures that involve material as well as human

resources. Any complex art form requires institutional infrastructures that are cumber-

some to manage and costly to sustain; and one could imagine few things potentially more

complicit in their dismantling than the idea that art is nothing more and nothing less than

the work of exceptional individuals. The rhetoric of autonomy, itself the product of a

certain ‘emancipating’ moment in the history of the artist, has also proved productive of

history, shaping influential images of the recent past. But those images, and the pluralist

model in particular, may ultimately offer less in the way of emancipation than we once

thought.

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