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The paper aims to gain fresh perspectives and to challenge standard thinking on Ligeti’s appropriation of Romanian folk music, drawing on very recent findings at the Sacher archives. By absorbing Romanian folk music in various ways during the different stages of his creative activity, Ligeti achieved a wide range of acoustic results which encompass citation, allusion, palimpsest, parody, and pastiche.
Therefore the topic requires an extended methodological tool kit, enabling the researcher to navigate their way through the multidimensional rhetoric of this composer. Only by calling upon a set of overlay techniques could one simultaneously explore the different layers of meaning, combining sketch studies, analysis, history and ethnomusicology.
A study of the documents at the Sacher archives reveals in detail the constancy of Ligeti’s relationship with Romanian folk music, from the early years of his youth in his native Transylvania to the end of his creative life. A clear temporal and stylistic trend emerges, in which the cities of Cluj and Bucharest are landmarks.
The analysis will chart how Ligeti’s pieces moved throughout the decades from folk music towards modern compositional disciplines, a journey from the villages of rural Romania to the concert hall, as shown by many of the composer’s manuscripts at the Sacher archives. Therefore the purpose of this research is mainly to emphasize an aspect that has hitherto attracted insufficient attention, as well as to retrace the stages in this process of transformation.
The music Ligeti heard on historic wax cylinders at the Folklore Institute in Bucharest during the years 1949-50, together with real-life performances in the Romanian countryside, had a long term effect on his writing. He began with some simple arrangements (Baladă şi joc, Romanian Concerto), where citation was the main artistic tool, and only later, once he had left the Eastern European bloc, placed it within a more global context.
The language of these pieces derives directly from Ligeti's engagement with folk instruments through evocations of timbre (bucium signals evoked in the symphony orchestra), rhythmic patterns, extemporized figuration and ornamentation of local folk dances, and in some cases micro-intervallic intonation in imitation of the original aural sources. Distilled in the score, these elements provide an additional dimension in terms of an awareness of the techniques and sound world to which Ligeti is referring.
Baladă şi joc, Romanian Concerto, fragments from the String Quartet no. 1 and Musica ricercata all show Ligeti’s attempt to mimic the traditional manner of a Romanian folk song accompaniment or to reproduce asymmetrical rhythmic patterns typical of the folklore of this country.
A turning point in Ligeti’s use of ethnic music is represented by his only opera Le Grand Macabre, which is strongly influenced by two Romanian writers of the absurd: Ioan L. Caragiale and Eugen Ionescu. The opera marks the dividing line between Ligeti’s reliance on borrowed folk music (abandoned once he left the Eastern European bloc, in 1956) and invented or ‘synthetic’ folk music, as defined by the musicologist Simon Gallot. The utterly grotesque collage from the third scene of his opera is emblematic (here Ligeti superimposes on Scott Joplin’s ragtime the melodic line of Podoleanu’s version of the Orthodox Paschal Troparion Christ Has Risen from the Dead). Both themes are rendered grotesque by distorted intervals while still being easily recognizable, proving a parodic, if not sarcastic way of handling the sources.
The end of the 70s was a time when the stylistic reconfiguration of Ligeti’s work was in full swing, when the composer expanded the sources of his inspiration, staking everything on a novel ars combinatoria of completely non-homogeneous elements. Ligeti resizes his creative lens to a larger geographical radius, overlapping disparate layers of material. From now on his compositional technique employs a wide array of folk reminiscences from different continents, cleverly disguised and hidden behind a kaleidoscopic mask of sources. Resulting in a rich cultural counterpoint of interlocking dialects, pieces of this period still retain Romanian folk elements in the background, as an imperfectly erased canvas, setting in his scores a palimpsest of memory, time and space.
Using an enriched lexicography during the last two decades of his creative life, traces of Romanian music linger and recur like blurred autobiographical echoes, in tandem with Hungarian folk music. This reminiscence, which we may call an anamnesis of his hybrid cultural roots, marks the revisiting of this Eastern European region, as well as of other world folk musics, used in a thoroughly novel combination. The original elements become unrecognisable, and are fused into a “new universal grammar”, as observed by Romanian composer Ştefan Niculescu (in a letter kept at the Sacher archives). As Ligeti himself emphasized, he recreated a global imaginary folklore, through the melding and deconstruction of many musical idioms. In his music the influences are filtered and reconfigured, affording strange, often cryptic, yet always fascinating reflections of his imaginary “Brueghellandia”, as a kind of musical tower of Babel.
By means of his Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano, Ligeti built a bridge over time back to his Romanian research period, recalling in its manuscript sketches the folk dance melodies from Covăsinţ village. Moreover, in describing the piece, he speaks of the layers of cultural connotations, a synthetic folklore of the Latin America and the Balkans – we could call it a striking “Balkanamera”, considering the aksak limping rhythm the common denominator of both musical cultures. The sketches of the Piano Studies kept at the Sacher archives reveal unexpected evocation of aksak rhythmic patterns from different dances of Dobrogea region; the Violin Concerto recalls the Romanian Căluşari dance, while the Viola Sonata proves, according to Ligeti’s manuscript notes, overt and covert connections with the folklore of Maramureş region, in the north part of this country. Pastiche, allusion, and even citation are the adopted means by which Ligeti reimagines the Romanian heritage, showing how folk tradition permeated the very fabric of the music, emerging in the last two decades in an original way.
All these, together with echoes of Romanian laments, carols, ballads, doinas, and hora lungă, show how the folk tradition, in its sublimated form, permeated the very fabric of the music within the notated framework of Ligeti's works.
By toying with tradition and playing with acoustic geographies in his compositions, Ligeti found an original way of permanently blurring the line between the modern and post- modern. Grasping this ethnic angle in its diachronic unfolding, the researcher discovers a new facet of Ligeti’s chameleonic profile; one which relies on citation, palimpsest, parody, and pastiche as ideal tools for encoding a fundamental yet lesser-known root of his complex language: Romanian folk music.