ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century art music, according to dominant narratives, variously oscillates between extremes of progression and retrospect, and unity and multiplicity. While the music of György Ligeti displays qualities from both ends of these scales, his famously ambiguous rhetoric and references to his ‘third way’ imply a determination to seek out an alternative, innovative ‘middle road’ beyond any such dichotomies. As this chapter will discuss, there are aspects of Ligeti’s music and his creative process that bring a level of substance to his rhetoric. Moreover, the middle road and its manifestation in Ligeti’s music can be traced to the influence of his Hungarian heritage and Béla Bartók in particular, revealing another significant but underexposed narrative in twentieth-century music. I will argue that the influence of Bartók permeates Ligeti’s compositional poetics to a much greater degree than is currently acknowledged.
The first reference to the middle road in twentieth-century music appears in a programme note by Schoenberg; the term is used to denote the compromise that he perceives in the retrospective tendencies in Stravinsky’s neoclassical music. These comments are referred to by Adorno in the opening pages of his seminal Philosophy of New Music; however, Adorno’s brief exegesis places the notion of compromise in a different, more favourable light (this aspect of his discussion is, arguably, widely misread). Adorno, in reference to René Leibowitz’s article ‘Béla Bartók, the Possibility of Compromise in Contemporary Music’, acclaims Bartók for pursuing the middle road in a move beyond the inevitability of progressive twelve-note music or retrospective diatonicism into new and innovative territory. Ligeti in turn explores the implications of Leibowitz’s discourse more fully in his own writings, praising the significance of Bartók. Moreover, several of Ligeti’s theoretical texts display underlying affinities with Bartókian tradition, and close archaeological studies of Ligeti’s music indicate the submersed and as yet largely unexplored influence of Bartók across the vast span of his oeuvre.
