ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the lament topic as a character piece in movements of the Musica ricercata and Requiem. Whether from the Baltic, Central Europe, or the Mediterranean, a typical folk lament embodies the same musical and narrative structure. Gyorgy Ligeti introduced the lament topos in early-and mid-career instrumental works as a rhetorical aside, a passage technically and affectively distinct from its musical context. Ligeti's appropriation of the pianto and its more expansive melodic and formal expressions continues this bifurcated general history of the lament topic. Ligeti's stated purpose in composing the exhaustive Musica ricercata was to develop a "new kind of music" from the ground up, beginning with the smallest unit and—through a single process of augmentation—constructing an 11-movement cycle. In Ligeti's works of the latter 1960s and 1970s the lament as apostrophe is marked by a combination of tonal instability and a disquieting, restless penetration of thematic and formal design, as evident in Ramifications, and the Double Concerto.
