Use, Denial, Rediscovering Ligeti and ethnic Music

Regarding Gyorgy Ligeti's relation to ethnic music, his oeuvre can be divided into three periods. Until 1956 he used East European folk music in the manner of Hungarian composition of the 1940s and 1950s, but upon leaving Hungary he apparently rejected folkloristic inspiration. In his late period from 1978 on, however, ethnic musics became again central to his creative work, albeit in a basically different way than in his youth. This article provides an overview of Ligeti's early folkloristic pieces and a brief characterization of his use of elements of Eastern European folklore in Le Grand Macabre, Hungarian Rock, Passacaglia ungherese and the Horn Trio. Finally, it traces back Ligeti's "lamento melody," that appears for the first time in the last movement of the Horn Trio, to certain types of the Hungarian folk lament. Ligeti's references to folklore do not mean an idealization of his past, but are rather signs of an ambivalent attitude toward his own roots, in which nostalgic longing, ironic distancing, and desperate mourning are equally present.