Ligeti Rhetoric Autonomy

twentieth-century music 1/1, 528 2004 Cambridge University Press
DOI: 10.1017/S1478572204000040 Printed in the United Kingdom
Gyrgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy
CHARLES WILSON
Abstract
Composers self-representations in articles, programme notes, and interviews have exerted a significant
influence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also wider
historiographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through the
published statements of Gyrgy Ligeti a rhetoric of autonomy, which tends to disavow allegiances to schools or
institutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type of
rhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities of
individuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigm
that much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ideology of the unique self (Jameson), has
left largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longer
accomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image of
the radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapably
caught 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 (Goldsmiths
College London, 29 June 2001), and at research seminars at the University of Surrey (5 February 2002) and the University
of 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.
5
6 Wilson Gyorgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy
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 economy6 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 Bourdieus
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 Gyrgy Ligeti.
4 As Dickie comments, although an artist can withdraw from contact with the various institutions of art, he cannot
withdraw from the institution of art because he carries it with him as Robinson Crusoe carried his Englishness with him
throughout his stay on the island (italics original); Dickie, The Art Circle, 4950. Or, to put it more loosely, you can
take 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), 13942.
6 Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject, xiv.
7 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 30.
Wilson Gyorgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy 7
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 dont write music navely. 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 dont 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 dont 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, Gyrgy 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 nave nor ideological. Other writings and interviews offer variants of the
neithernor formula: my independence from both X and non-X10 or I detest/am against
both X and non-X.11 One recalls immediately the neithernorism 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 neithernor 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
neithernor 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, Gyrgy Ligeti, 3345.

9 Ligeti, liner notes to Gyrgy Ligeti Edition 3, 1112.
10 With the Piano Concerto I offer my aesthetic credo: my independence both from the criteria of the traditional
avant-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 little
disordered. I detest absolute geometry and absolute chaos; Michel, Entretiens avec Gyrgy Ligeti, in Gyrgy Ligeti:
compositeur daujourdhui, 200.
12 Barthes, NeitherNor Criticism (1957), 83.
kind of label whether Marxist, serialist or postmodernist and declare their own work
difficult to categorize.13 There is therefore no reason to regard Ligetis statements as
especially surprising or remarkable. More striking, perhaps, is the ease with which Ligetis
rhetorical manners infiltrate the prose of his commentators. Alastair Williams, for instance,
speaks of Ligetis 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 Gyrgy 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 neithernor or beyond X and
non-X variety are simply the best we can do to encapsulate the elusive nature of Ligetis
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-arts-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, Gyrgy Ligetis New Lyricism, 239.
16 Thomas, New Times, New Clocks, 379.
17 Floros, Gyrgy 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, Gyrgy, 694. For the
phrase Ich bin immer derselber Mensch, and slight variants on it, see Lobanova, Ich sehe keinen Widerspruch
zwischen Tradition und Modernitt! , 14; Lichtenfeld, Gesprch mit Gyrgy Ligeti, 8; Gojowy, Gyrgy Ligeti ber
eigene Werke, 353; Wiesmann, The Island is Full of Noise , 510; Dibelius, Gesprch ber sthetik, 268.
words;20 and widespread recognition of this coincided, not fortuitously, with the birth of
copyright, a form of ownership dependent on evidence of a works 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 Ligetis 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 Ligetis
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 Grecki, Arvo
Prt, 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 CologneDarmstadt 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
DarmstadtCologne 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

21 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 169, 174.
22 Ligeti in Conversation, 512. 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 musics tie is badly done up;
Lichtenfeld, Musik mit schlecht gebundener Krawatte, 472.
23 Dibelius, Gesprch ber sthetik, 263, 268.
24 Dibelius, Gesprch ber sthetik, 273, 253.
25 Griffiths, Ligeti, 690.
27 Lobanova, Ich sehe keinen Widerspruch , 12.
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 Ligetis
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 Ligetis 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 Ligetis 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 Boulezs Structure 1a
in the journal Die Reihe is often cited as a devastating expos 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 Ligetis 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 Ligetis copious footnote refer-
ences to the theoretical writings of Herbert Eimert, Henri Pousseur, and Stockhausen
testify.32 Even one of Ligetis 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 Stockhausens 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, 19091.

29 Floros, Hommage a Gyrgy Ligeti, 25.
30 Ligeti, Decision and Automatism in Structure 1a, 3662.
31 Boulezs self-critique was first published as Eventuellement . . ., 11748; translated as Possibly . . ., 11140. For a
cogent critique of the accuracy and objectivity of Ligetis analysis, see Piencikowski, Inschriften.
32 Ligeti, Metamorphoses of Musical Form, 519.
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 is
dissolved by composition; Stockhausen, Music in Space, 7980.
not only Ligetis 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
composers flat in 1957 also provide the basis of Ligetis own Apparitions (19589) and
Atmosphres (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, Ligetis abandonment of harmonic neutrality36
and subsequent restoration of melodic shape, that forbidden fruit of modern music37 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
Ligetis Lontano (1967) lacks the wide-ranging inclusivity evident in Pousseurs Votre Faust
(196068), just as there is a world of difference between the Mantra of Stockhausens
eponymous work (196970) and the Melodien of Ligetis (1971). But such contemporary
examples, and the theoretical discussions that ran alongside them (such as Pousseurs
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. Ligetis
solutions, however innovative and resourceful, were shaped in response to issues that were
more than merely personal.
If Ligetis 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 Madernas 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 artists 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 fr 9 Instrumente Op. 24: Analyse des ersten Satzes (1953), Von Webern zu
Debussy: Bemerkungen zur statistischen Form (1954), and Gruppenkomposition: Klavierstck I (Anleitung zum
Hren) (1955); all reprinted in Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte: Band I.
36 Ligeti in Conversation, 126.
38 Pousseur, Lapothose de Rameau, 10572.
39 Dalmonte, Maderna, Bruno, 534.
40 Gorodecki, Luigi Nono: a History of Belief , 1017.
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 Sanctification
of Misapprehension into a Doctrine, 437.
42 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 6061, 1067.
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 Ligetis 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.
Ligetis apparent rejection of postmodernism appears to stem from similar distancing
motives. Indeed a number of writers have seen rather distinct parallels between Ligetis 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 works odd angles and trick floors
completely rule out any postmodern compositional conception.45 Ligetis 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 Ligetis former
students, such as Georg von Dadelsen, Detlev Mller-Siemens, and Hans-Jrgen von Bose.46
Ligetis 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 Trios 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 premire of the five-movement version of the Piano Concerto, Richard Toop,
commenting on Ligetis aesthetic credo (cited in footnote 10), remarks: At one level, it is a surprising claim, in that
many 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 Clendenning
adopts a similar viewpoint on the same work in Postmodern Architecture/Postmodern Music. Peter Niklas Wilson,
meanwhile, referring to Charles Jenckss well-known definition of postmodernism as characterized by ambiguity and
double coding, notes that much in Ligetis sound-world is also double or rather multiply coded. It is a world of
stylistic false trails, absurdities and ambiguities, of trompe loreille; Wilson, Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit, 44.
44 Quoted in Wilson, Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit, 44.
46 See Joakim Tillman, Postmodernism and Art Music, 7591.
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 with
theirs; Toop, Gyrgy Ligeti, 152.
48 Lobanova, Ich sehe keinen Widerspruch , 12.
the category played an essential role in defining, differentially at least, Ligetis 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 neithernor critic, it is only when man
proclaims his primal liberty that his subordination is least disputable.50 This is to suggest
that Ligetis 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, Ligetis 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 Ligetis 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, NeitherNor Criticism, 82.
52 The dream was first recounted in Ligetis article Zustnde, Ereignisse, Wandlungen (1967), 1659; translated by
Jonathan Bernard as States, Events, Transformations, 16471. See also Ligeti in Conversation, 25n.
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 Ligetis 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 sensations56 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 Ligetis 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: Ligetis 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
Ligetis 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 others
which are misremembered; but almost inevitably their authors will take up an attitude to both which is personal and
subjective. Even more inevitably, they will rely for their records on language which must, to some degree, be the
repository of what they have experienced between the period when the episode took place and the moment they
decided 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 further
from my intention than to create illustrative or wholly programmatic art (165). But symptomatically the article
begins by recounting the childhood dream mentioned above, and the vocabulary of the following description of
Apparitions 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, Gyrgy 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 Ligetis compositional make-up
a key, indeed the key for a deeper understanding of Ligetis music; Hommage, 27.
60 At the time he wrote Apparitions and Atmosphres Ligeti knew some of these sound-mass pieces, such as Stock-
hausens Gruppen and Carr, but not others. Of Xenakis, according to Richard Steinitz, he knew Pithoprakta but not
Metastasis; see Steinitz, Gyrgy Ligeti, 92. On the matter of Pendereckis influence Ligeti is equivocal: in 1975 he
remarked that Anaklasis may have left its mark on Atmosphres, given that he encountered it while the latter was still
in rough draft; see Ligeti in Conversation, 37. Steinitz, on the other hand, suggests (99) that Ligeti was unaware of this
example.
as Atmosphres 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 spiders 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 Ligetis compositions, the Pome 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 groups agenda: the silent
lecture, Die Zukunft der Musik, and the Trois bagatelles for piano, a rather crass satire on
Cages 433.63 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 stage65 for the pizzicato movement of the string quartet

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 in
1960, 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 artist
working in this direction I suggested or performed numerous Fluxus pieces in the following two years; liner notes
to Gyrgy Ligeti Edition 5, 8.
64 Nordwall, Gyrgy Ligeti, 38. Another letter quoted by Nordwall describes the purpose of Pome symphonique as a
double 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 Pome symphonique was
rejected both by the petty bourgeois . . . [and] by the ostensibly radical (8). But it is hard to see how the work
resists absorption into the domain of the happening or similar manifestations of the radical compositional
situation; and, if indeed it was a satire on official concert life, it sits uneasily with Ligetis later output, which consists
almost exclusively of concert music for traditional forces.
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 works 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 Ligetis neithernor 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 Ligetis
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 Ligetis, 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.
II
Interviewed 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 Gyrgy Ligeti Edition 5, 13.

67 Clendenning, The Pattern-Meccanico Compositions of Gyrgy Ligeti, 192234; Structural Factors in the Micro-
canonic Compositions of Gyrgy Ligeti, 22956. For discussion of the nature of meccanico as a category (and the
validity of net-structure) see Roig-Francoli, Harmonic and Formal Processes in Ligetis Net-Structure Composi-
tions, and the review of this article by Clendenning.
68 Hicks, Interval and Form in Ligetis Continuum and Coule, 17290; see also Ligeti in Conversation, 6061.
69 This is the case when Peter Burt uses the term in his discussion of Takemitsus Autumn; see The Music of Toru
Takemitsu, 127 (referring back to 98).
70 Dibelius, Gesprch ber sthetik, 256.
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 works 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
Ligetis 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 Prt, 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 Donnes 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, Gesprch ber sthetik, 254.

73 The back-cover text of Steinitzs book is symptomatic, consisting entirely of quotations from the composer, which
are simply left to speak for themselves.
74 See, for instance, Albrecht Riethmller, Komposition, sthetik, Musikwissenschaft, 13.
75 I am echoing here Carl Dahlhauss comment that a composers self-analyses should be treated as material that
requires interpretation, rather than predetermining that interpretation; Dahlhaus, Muss Neue Musik erklrt
werden?, 35.
76 Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 114.
was being unmasked as a philosophical and cultural mystification. But to judge the ideol-
ogy of the unique self to be over and done with77 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 Meyers 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 Jamesons 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-Franois 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 . Postmodernisms 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. Lyotards 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 defining
relationships are immanent and, by implication, unique to that work: hence it is a primarily formal definition of
autonomy.
79 Morgan, Rethinking Musical Culture, 58.
80 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 82.
81 Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 4.
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 critics 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, pluralisms 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

84 Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, 142.
86 Many of the points in Hal Fosters essay Against Pluralism retain their force and pertinence two decades on; see his
Recodings, 1332.
87 Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, 71.
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 economic91 is
entirely characteristic of the modernist artist who has, in Bourdieus phrase, an interest in
disinterestedness92 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 neithernor 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 Ligetis 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, Gyrgy 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 of
prominent musicians who rallied to his defence; Lebrecht, When the Music Stops, 14.
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 very
suggestion that the subject has selflessly broken off from the real work of composition in order simply to talk about
it serves only to further the notion that music alone is the composers concern, not any desire to explain it or
persuade people to like it or invest in it. While, say, writing an article implies a deliberate motivation an active desire
to 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 is
created all the same.
94 Wernick, Authorship and the Supplement of Promotion, 87.
95 Foster, Recodings, 36.
Since the late 1980s the marketing of Ligetis 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 Festivals 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 Vilm Flussers 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 Ligetis 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
composers emigr 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 Wartofskys words, to enlarge the horizon of
96 White, Fears of a Clown. Marketing plans for the Ligeti Project, the complete CD edition launched by Sony
Classical in 1996 (and completed by Warner Classics when Sony later aborted it), mention Ligetis unique face as
a means to develop a real identification between the composer and the record-buying public; minutes of a
presentation by Philippe Pnicaut of Sony Classical given at Royal Festival Hall, London, 18 November 1994; held
at archive of Schott Edition, London. Quoted by permission of Sony Music Entertainment (UK) Limited.
97 White, Fears of a Clown.
100 Wilson, Vom Nutzen der Wurzellosigkeit, 42. The starkly contrasted case studies treated by Critchfield in When
Lucifer Cometh demonstrate that, while the perception or projection of self as alien or outsider may be a common
strand in the self-representation of exiles, so also is the contrary, perhaps overcompensating desire for integration
and assimilation.
101 Burde, Gyrgy Ligeti, 9. Terry Eagleton writes scathingly of this tendency to idealize the notion of diaspora on the
part of more callow postmodernists . . . for whom nationlessness is next to godliness; The Idea of Culture, 44.
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 Bank
Centre, London.
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 works 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 Ligetis
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
pluralisms 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 Ligetis music of the last two decades. The influences
he cites in respect of works such as the piano tudes 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
modernisms 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, 2234.

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 always
accessible and emotional; minutes of Pnicaut presentation (see note 96), quoted by permission of Sony Music
Entertainment (UK) Limited. Ligeti frequently polemicizes against the homogeneous levelled-out culture pro-
duced by world music; see Floros, Wohin orientiert sich die Musik?, 5.
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 todays composers the possibility of such communal projects, based on shared
aesthetic commitments, probably seems remote. As Julian Johnson has noted, pluralisms
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 Music
and Musical Practices in Postmodernity. Interestingly we find Pierre Boulez, from his similarly privileged vantage
point, 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 trap
and have written their music entirely in terms of this small network; Boulez, Conversations with Clestin Delige, 77.
106 Howard Becker has pointed out how in the USA as early as the 1970s the total number of literary magazines
exceeded 1500. Of those only around two or three had a circulation of 10,000 or more readers. With the
proliferation of publishing outlets, only those authors published by one of the few large-circulation magazines had
any opportunity to achieve reputations that have wide currency and thus represent the consensus of a major art
world; Becker, Art Worlds, 363.
107 Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?, 115.
108 Threasher, Proms Commissions and Premires, 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 way
is arguably significant in itself.
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.
Gyrgy 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 composers 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 criticisms 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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Ligeti Rhetoric Autonomy

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twentieth-century music 1/1, 528 2004 Cambridge University Press

DOI: 10.1017/S1478572204000040 Printed in the United Kingdom

Gyrgy Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy

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

8 Dufallo, Gyrgy Ligeti, 3345.

13 See Bourdieu, In Other Words, 27.

20 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 58.

28 Frisius, Personalstil und Musiksprache, 19091.

49 Floros, Hommage, 25.

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

61 Ligeti in Conversation, 39.

66 Liner notes to Gyrgy Ligeti Edition 5, 13.

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

72 Dibelius, Gesprch ber sthetik, 254.

77 Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, 115.

82 Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics, 2.

88 Beyer, Gyrgy Ligeti, 11.

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

102 Wartofsky, The Politics of Art, 2234.

110 Foster, The Return of the Real, 73.

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