An analysis of Ligeti's Hungarian Rock DOCX

Title	An analysis of Ligeti's Hungarian Rock
Author	Irina Makalovskaia
Pages	12
File Size	674.5 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	155
Total Views	649

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Irina Makalovskaia Analysis of Modernism Prof. Kyle Gann Bard College Fall Term 2014 An Analysis of Hungarian Rock written by Gyorgy Ligeti Hungurian Rock was written by Gyorgy Ligeti in May of 1978. The piece has a subtitle Chaconne. It is interesting how these three words — Hungary, Rock, and Chaconne, — go all together in the one title. Rock in Hungary was prohibited since its beginning in 1960s1 . Censors would check the music for any anti-governmental ideas. The chaconne was a popular dance and song in the 16th and 17th centuries and was considered immoral popular music at that time. So the provocative title Hungarian Rock, coupled with the old genre of chaconne seems to state some kind of political message. Perhaps Ligeti aimed to show that something cannot be rejected because it has a negative connotation and later on everything may earn artistic value. I strongly believe that the choice of the genre and the instrument was made by Ligeti not randomly, and that Ligeti found similarities between rock music and chaconne, which seem to be so different at the first glance. This phenomenon of combination of what seems incongruous is one of the features of postmodern culture. Kenneth Gloag writes in his book that the key factors of postmodernism are "fragmentation, pluralism, difference"2 . Let us analyze how these features appear in Ligeti's Hungarian Rock. Ligeti was not the first musician who tried to unite rock with classical (in the meaning of anything that is not modern) genres. Other musicians since the late 1960s had been looking 1 Szemere Anna. Some Institutional Aspects of Pop and Rock in Hungary. Popular Music, Vol. 3, Producers and Markets (1983). Web. http://www.jstor.org/stable/853097. Accessed 30/12/2014. 2 Gloag, Kenneth (2012). Postmodernism in Music. Cambridge University Press. P. 2....