ABSTRACT
In 1983, the composer first heard the music of Central Africa and met the French-Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. Gyorgy Ligeti saw in non-Western indigenous music new rhythmic and formal possibilities, as well as "a new kind of tonality, with other possibilities for laws than those of function". Musical exoticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has a complex and ambiguous history and hermeneutics. Modernist composers may have rejected the surface charm of chinoiserie, but many remained enamored of Eastern and other non-Western music and aesthetics. Although Ligeti engaged with several traditions of non-Western music, scholars and commentators have focused primarily on his fascination with African polyphony. Musik kontemporer is one of many Asian movements that self-reflectively employ the aesthetics and techniques of local musical traditions within a Westernized performance context. African influences are clearly perceptible in the first and fifth movements of the Piano Concerto.
